[colechristensen]

The young will use and understand them much more.

How many years will it be before the Oxford English Dictionary begins listing definitions for individual and groups of emoji? In 100 years they will just be an ordinary feature of language somewhere between a word and a punctuation mark.

[acheron]

"What are letters?"

"Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read."

-- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

[ang_cire]

How would they have learned a contraction if everything is based on glyphs/ images?

[colechristensen]

Plenty of words are contractions or otherwise combinations of other words that you don't know about unless you're particularly interested in language.

"Goodbye" = "God be with ye" for example

You don't think "will not" when you say "won't", "won't" is just a word you use with a meaning you understand long before you can write.

[ang_cire]

See my other comment below, but all the things you're talking about work because English has a phonetic alphabet.

You can break 'be with ye' into 'b', 'y', and 'e', and drop the rest. In languages like Chinese which do not have a phonetic writing system, you cannot drop individual sounds within a word/character in a rule-based way like contractions.

Emojis are not a phonetic system, so unless you created an emoji for "they're", separate from the emojis for "they" and "are", you wouldn't have it as a word.

[bee_rider]

Haven’t read it, but society is quite changed in The Diamond Age, I think. In the protagonist even speaking English? If not, we could assume it is sort of “translated” into English (in the sense that most fiction that doesn’t take place on modern day Earth is).

[ang_cire]

This actually makes the most sense out of any of the replies, honestly.

[thfuran]

You don't need to know how to write to speak.

[ang_cire]

No, but languages that use glyphs that are monophonemic and non-phonetic (one-sound per-glyph/character) don't have contractions, which are a function of removing some component part of a word when combining them.

For instance, both Chinese and Japanese use kanji/hanzi, but Chinese is monophonemic, and does not have a phonetic alphabet that characters can be broken into (radicals aside, which are not related to sound). Japanese does (kana).

As a result, combining 2 characters in Chinese never changes the sound of some sub-portion of a character; it's either the whole sound that changes, or nothing. In Japanese, on the other hand, individual kana within a character can change (e.g. Rendaku), so for instance 'hito' (person) put twice in a row becomes hitobito instead of hitohito, because hito is comprised of 2 kana characters: 'hi' and 'to', and 'hi' becomes 'bi'.

Emoji have no subcomponent characters, so you either would need an emoji for a contraction word in addition to the source words, or, more realistically, you just wouldn't have them at all.

[thfuran]

And you're saying that in Japanese and Chinese no word is ever informally pronounced in abbreviated fashion by eliding some phoneme(s)?

[ang_cire]

In Japanese, yes, because it has a phonetic alphabet. For example, "konnichiwa" is often shortened as "kon'chiwa".

In Chinese, there is shorthand slang, but not shortening of words in writing based on spoken sounds (since it's not phonetic).

So even if "wo shi" (I am) might be spoken more quickly, there's no way to write that shortened version out in Chinese. You will actually see Chinese speakers use Latin characters and Arabic numerals for phonetic shorthand, (e.g. '88' for "bye bye", because 8 is pronounced 'ba'/'bai'.

[DEADMINCE]

Because it wasn't always.

[pessimizer]

I don't think they will. The problem with them isn't that people don't understand what they mean, it's that they require a lot of context to understand even when they are used naturally and freely. There's a reason why languages have grammar. They're really used for decoration, or to disambiguate between a short list of expected responses already established in the past by using words.

i.e. a handful of emojis to explain the state of a machine is no more expressive than using a handful of colors to do the same thing. In that situation you'd react the same way to an emoji that I've thrown at you for the first time as with a color I've thrown at you for the first time. Suddenly the indicator is violet, or the indicator is smileyface emoji with big hearts for eyes: the question is what that meant to the programmer, and the emoji doesn't give any more indication than the color. "Are you trying to tell me that the server really loves my new blouse?"