Back in olden times, people had to write long boring poems to express their deepest, most intimate feelings. Fortunately, we live in the modern world so all we have to do to show how we truly feel about something is choose the right emoji to add to the end of our text messages
The successor to old school text-based emoticons — may they rest in peace :’( — emoji are the little stickers that you can insert into messages to indicate feelings of shock, happiness, poo or eggplant. They have become such an integral part of our everyday communications that a day has been designated in their honor, #worldemojiday, which was celebrated yesterday.
As the most Twitter active country in the world, Indonesians obviously deploy a lot of emojis on a daily basis. Knowing which emoji is most often used by the citizens of a certain country could give deep insight into that nation’s psyche. So what is the most used emoji in the Indonesian twittersphere?
That’s right, the laughing while crying (or laughing so hard you start to cry) emoticon is officially the most used by Indonesian tweeters, according to data collected by the microblogging site over the last year.
That seems appropriate, since there are so many things happening in Indonesia to which the only reasonable reaction is to laugh while crying at the same time.
However, while that is the most commonly used emoji in Indonesia, that is not the most uniquely Indonesian emoji. The Twitter prime account posted this chart, which shows the most used emoji by country (but in the fine print adds, “excluding emojis in the global top 10 ranking”).
By that metric, the “Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes” emoji is the most uniquely Indonesian. Which also seems quite appropriate, because the way it’s often rendered in messaging apps makes it look like “face smiling through gritted teeth” which is another reaction we often have to things in Indonesia.
Unsurprisingly, emoji supporting LGBT families and rights are not among the most used in Indonesia, but fortunately they still remain legal here despite some politicians attempts to ban them.
