We all love to and the French are : what we learned about emojis at SXSW

We might not have realised it, but emojis have given us a powerful shorthand emotional vocabulary - even if most of us are cry-laughing 20% of the time

Linguists, and perhaps everyone else, started taking emojis a bit more seriously after Oxford Dictionaries made the "tears of joy" emoji its word of the year in November. The first, very basic, emojis were created in Japan around 1998, but the rich, color emojis we use now didn't make it to a full emoji keyboard on Apple's iOS devices until 2011 and Android in 2013.

The alternative keyboard app SwiftKey found in August that 70% of emojis are used to express positive emotion, 15% neutral and only 15% negative. SwiftKey co-founder Ben Medlock told a packed room at SXSW that this might be because we tend to feel we have to present a positive image to the world. So we're self-editing in favor of happy, shiny emojis.