Abstract in English:

Over the past decade and driven by the prevalence of messaging apps, images have become an integral part of digital personal communication. This article addresses the emoji phenomenon from a pragmalinguistic perspective. Starting from examples from journalistic media describing emojis as a potential ›threat‹ for language and linguistic competences, we address two aspects of scepticism towards emojis in relation to the (German) language: (i) the question of whether emojis are capable of making language obsolete as a means of interpersonal communication (= ›end of cultivated written language‹) and whether they have the potential to replace language in the form of a pictorial symbol language which is considered less expressive; (ii) whether the high-frequency use of emojis in some domains of linguistic activity threatens the function and expressive power of written communication (= ›language decline‹, which impairs the expressive capacity of our language). Based on authentic examples of private WhatsApp communication from a linguistic corpus, we show that the use of emojis in written everyday communication does not make language ›poorer‹. Quite contrary to the fears expressed in the public discourse, emojis take on important functions for securing understanding and shaping relationships and, thus, have to be considered a multimodal device which support the organisation of interpersonal communication in the digital world.