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Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton had to find out the hard way that there’s a time and a place for emoji. Unfortunately for Clinton, that time is not on Twitter when you’re asking people to talk about their student loan debt. Fortunately for the rest of us, it’s just about anywhere else when talking about anything else.

While emoji have become something of an international lingo (tiny characters can certainly transcend language and cultural barriers more easily than words sometimes), like any language, there are local dialects. SwiftKey went ahead and analyzed 1 billion emoji used across iOS and Android to try and decipher how their use changes geographically. The texting app pulled this data from aggregate SwiftKey cloud data (an opt-in feature of the service that is “occasionally analyzed for pertinent trends as well as to make sure SwiftKey’s predictions are as accurate as possible”) over the course of a month.

While this certainly isn’t a cumulative look at the entirety of Internet and mobile users’ habits, it’s definitely a large swath of people. Though, you could argue that the differences between SwiftKey demographics versus larger smartphone consumer base factors into this emoji use. Still! 1 billion is a big number, and SwiftKey is a very popular app—it’s not exactly a fringe userbase the fascinating results were culled from.

And fascinating they are. For instance, Nevada embraces its sex-obsessed reputation: Emoji commonly use to represent lascivious behavior (the open mouth) and male genitalia (the eggplant) are often used here. The state is also the top user of the angel emoji. California is food-focused—sushi, ramen, and the lemon rank highly there. In Missouri, the cop emoji is wildly popular. To no one’s surprise, New York is the number one place people use the Statue of Liberty emoji. Washington is the number one user of wine, New Hampshire of beer, Vermont of poop, and Louisiana of the gun emoji.

SwiftKey also calculated which states had the least and most of certain categories of emoji. South Dakota uses the most happy emoji, New Jersey the most sad emoji. The most alcohol-related emoji goes to New Hampshire, while the least to Alabama. While our penchant for confirmation bias might make us nod and think “oh sure, that makes sense,” (Arkansas loves religious emoji? Yep) plenty of the results don’t line up with regional stereotypes. For example, Oregon—home of hippie, quinoa-obsessed foodies (this Oregon native is allowed to say that)—is the biggest user of junk food emoji, while Mississippi uses the least. And North Dakota—a longstanding red state—uses the most LGTB emoji. Kansas uses the most tech emoji.

When asked to note surprising findings, SwiftKey remarked that the surfing emoji’s popularity in Michigan, the koala’s in Connecticut, and the elephant’s in Alabama were among the unexpected results. (Our own Brian Barrett offered that the University of Alabama, though known as the Crimson Tide, uses an elephant as its mascot. Mystery solved.)

SwiftKey emoji SwiftKeySo what does it mean? Well, only that emoji mean something different to all of us—which is simultaneously one of the standard’s benefits and challenges. A recent test from One Hour Translation found that people commonly associate the same emoji with very different meanings. While this experiment was done across global lines, the variety of interpretation is astounding: The sick emoji next to a flexing arm meant bicep implants to French-Canadians; it meant smelly armpits to Arabic speakers.Emoji translation was actually the hard part of creating this report: SwiftKey says that making sure people could read the report across different devices and platforms was a challenge. “It was difficult to find a way to share the data externally so that anyone could see it, without replacing each emoji with an image file instead,” SwiftKey tells WIRED. “After much trial and error, we were delighted (and very relieved) to discover OpenOffice documents will show all emoji if you save them as PDFs.” The interactive map SwiftKey created to go with the study was designed to be viewable across different platforms and devices.As emoji continue to morph how digital language is evolving, trying to further understand what they mean to us and how we can efficiently use them to communicate isn’t just fun—it’s necessary. There are outlets using them to help abused children understand and express themselves, and at least one deaf group is lobbying to include American Sign Language symbols. Clearly, we’ve got a ways to go if we’re going to use emoji as a universal code, but for now we’re simply left wondering: Why does Oklahoma love the ghost emoji so much?Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.
I Wonder Why the Eggplant Is Nevada’s Most Popular Emoji
I Wonder Why the Eggplant Is Nevada’s Most Popular Emoji

Read more http://www.wired.com/2015/08/the-most-popular-emoji-in-all-50-states/


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