Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures

TLDR

Emoticons serve as nonverbal cues in text‑based communication, and as their use expands, a culturally diverse vocabulary of symbols with subtle emotional distinctions emerges. The study investigates the semantic, cultural, and social dimensions of emoticon use on Twitter, revealing that they function as socio‑cultural norms whose meanings depend on speaker identity and that these norms spread through the @‑reply network. The authors analyze over one billion tweets from multiple time periods and countries to validate these findings. Emoticons are not merely expressions of specific emotions or jokes; instead, they act as socio‑cultural norms whose meanings vary by speaker identity and propagate across Twitter’s reply network.

Abstract

Emoticons are a key aspect of text-based communication, and are the equivalent of nonverbal cues to the medium of online chat, forums, and social media like Twitter. As emoticons become more widespread in computer mediated communication, a vocabulary of different symbols with subtle emotional distinctions emerges especially across different cultures. In this paper, we investigate the semantic, cultural, and social aspects of emoticon usage on Twitter and show that emoticons are not limited to conveying a specific emotion or used as jokes, but rather are socio-cultural norms, whose meaning can vary depending on the identity of the speaker. We also demonstrate how these norms propagate through the Twitter @-reply network. We confirm our results on a large-scale dataset of over one billion Tweets from different time periods and countries.