Here's What Your Country's Favorite Emoji Says About You
Americans, you raunchy devils.
The Stars and Stripes are the world leaders in texting the eggplant emoji, everyone's favorite sexual innuendo.
This fact is one of many included in the "Emoji Report," published on Tuesday by SwiftKey, an app that predicts which word a user will type next. The report examines over 1 billion pieces of emoji data from around the and analyzes how different speakers utilize the tiny little characters.
Using a sample taken between October 2014 and January 2015 on both Android and iOS devices, the SwiftKey team looked at various categories, including happy faces, romance, LGBT, alcohol and violence, to understand the behavior and thought processes of emoji users.
The results: Overall, emoji users seem like a happy bunch. Happy faces constituted 44.8% of all emoji used, compared with 14.3% for sad faces. Hearts clocked in at 12.5%, hand gestures measured in at 5.3%, and monkeys — those cute "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" fellows — made up 1.7% of all emoji usage.
On the other end of the spectrum, reading materials, film, travel tools and meat came in as the least-used. (Yet another win for the vegans, apparently: Plants and flowers were in the middle of the pack.)
Country by country: Besides their love of the eggplant, Americans also dug skulls, birthday cakes, fire, meat, technology and what SwiftKey described as "female-oriented emoji."
Canadians were frequent users of symbols that indicated money, violence, sports, sex and poop (but really, who isn't?).
Australia landed squarely in the bad-behavior emoji camp, with "double the average amount of alcohol-themed emoji, 65% more drug emoji than average and leading for both junk food and holiday emoji," according to the report.
Over in Europe, French speakers used four times as many heart emojis than any other language, and it's the only documented language whose No. 1 emoji was not a happy face. In the United Kingdom, the wine emoji is particularly popular, as is the winking face — but the peace sign is distinctly unpopular.
Rounding out the results: Malaysia used more poop emoji than any other country, Russian speakers used the most cold-weather emoji and Arabic speakers ranked first when it came to warm-weather emoji.
But we are not necessarily the sum of our texts. Emoji is a fun method of communication, but it shouldn't be taken literally.
Australia, for example, may be way above average for alcohol emoji use, but it's not that way in real life — the nation only ranks 20th in global alcohol consumption, according to the World Health Organization. And while Canada may seem like a violent wasteland, it falls far behind the United States in terms of gun violence.
Moreover, context is king when it comes to emojis. Just look at the beloved NSFW eggplant: Maybe you're just making a stir-fry for dinner. As Cara Rose DeFabio points out at Fusion, "Knowing which emoji people are using does not tell us how they are using them."
Then again, as long as masterpieces like Emoji Dick and Emojis in Paris keep popping up, we'll be happy.
h/t Daily Dot
