Abstract

SwiftKey analyzed more than one billion pieces of emoji data across a wide range of categories to learn how speakers of 16 different languages and regions use emoji. The findings in this report came from an analysis of aggregate SwiftKey Cloud data over a four month period between October
2014 and January 2015, and includes both Android and iOS devices.
This report will analyze languages and language variants (eg US vs Latin American Spanish) across 60 emoji categories. The first section identifies ‘language leaders’ for each category, then compares emoji usage between English language speakers, sentiment across emoji and languages, and lists
the most over-indexed emoji for the US.

This is followed by a breakdown of the more interesting categories, including a look how the leaders of each category compare to the average, visual representations of the data, and additional data on other categories not yet mentioned.

Note: as there are over 800 emoji, the frequency of any individual emoji is often small. The numbers referenced below (e.g. 0.29%) represent how often each emoji is used out of all emoji usage.

Findings of note:

• Canadians score highest in emoji categories some may consider to be more American (money, raunchy, violent, sports)
• French use four times as many heart emoji than other languages, and it’s the only language for which a ‘smiley’ is not #1
• Flowers and plants emoji are used at more than 4X the average rate by Arabic speakers
• Russian speakers use three times as much romantic emoji than the average
• Australia’s emoji use characterizes it as the land of vice & indulgence, using double the average amount of alcohol themed emoji, 65% more drug emoji than average and leading for both junk food and holiday emoji
• Americans lead for a random assortment of emoji & categories, including skulls, birthday cake, fire, tech, LGBT, meat and female oriented emoji