What is it about?
This study examines how people use kissing emojis in WhatsApp conversations and whether their usage reflects real-life cheek-kissing habits. Researchers analyzed chats from Spain, Germany, and the German-speaking part of Switzerland—three places with different cheek-kissing customs. The results show that the “face throwing a kiss” emoji is often used to close conversations in Spain and Switzerland, while in Germany, kissing emojis are rarely used at the end of chats. However, these emojis are rarely used to start conversations in any of the three regions. The findings suggest that while kissing emojis vary by culture, they do not perfectly mimic real-life social behaviors.
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Why is it important?
At the time of publication, there were no studies that compared the use of emojis in messaging interactions across languages.
Perspectives
In Spain people kiss while greeting, but in Germany they do not. Is this behavior also reflected in the use of emojis? This paper explores this question.
Agnese Sampietro
Universitat Jaume I
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Do you kiss when you text? Cross-cultural differences in the use of the kissing emojis in three WhatsApp corpora, Intercultural Pragmatics, March 2022, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ip-2022-2002.
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