Is Emoji The First Truly Global Language?

Emoji are small smiley face icons that people use to convey the meaning of something or and emotion whilst communicating digitally with someone. These picture characters have only just become popular, however, the first use of graphic text on computers was ":-)" used in 1982. These emoji were first introduced on Japanese smartphones, but the emoji were not able to be rendered correctly when they were used in messages sent across the world. There are now 722 standard emoji, which were made by Uniccode Consortium. 

Unicode named this the "sleepy face", in Japanese cartoons the bubble from the mouth represents sleep. However, internationally it is interpreted as crying or drooling. Personally, even I thought and use this emoji as a crying face emoji. So you can see that despite emoji becoming the first truly globally accepted language, it still creates misunderstanding due to misinterpretation of the faces. 

A study released in late December 2016, analysed 427 million messages in 212 countries and found that the crying laughter face was the most used emoji, followed by the red heart, followed by the smiling face with heart eyes. 

Will emoji become our new way of communicating? Will emoji replace slang? Some people also have concerns that we will become even more lazier and just communicate in emoji form.