It is without a doubt one of the clearest expressions of Italian culture you can get. He is recognized around the world. He has his own Wikipedia page. And since January 2020, when it was added to the list of characters recognized by the Unicode consortium, it has its own emoji: 🤌.

You may know it as the “Italian hand gesture”. For aesthetes who are content with nothing less than the original Italian, it’s “Che vuoi? Some Twitter users see something more perverse. The Unicode consortium calls it the “pinched-finger emoji.”

And now it has been analyzed by a team of academics including David Garcia, professor of computer and social sciences at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Garcia and her colleagues used natural language processing to analyze the contexts in which pinched finger emoji were used on Twitter in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Korean.

The goal was to gain a better understanding of what pinched finger emoji mean to people – and how it might differ depending on your experience. “When we spoke to the lab, we noticed that we had seen it in very different contexts and with different meanings,” says Garcia. He and his team have discovered that emoji and the physical action behind them resonate well beyond the borders of Italy.

Of course, Garcia and his colleagues couldn’t ignore Italy’s contribution to all things pinched. “We were able to identify several contexts and drivers of the use of 🤌,” he says. “One is the Italian sense of complaining or expressing frustration, but also in general in relation to Italian culture and in particular to food. “

In total, the researchers identified 24 different potential interpretations of the pinched finger emoji, each of which has been deployed to demonstrate a different meaning depending on its context. School children around the world have used it to summarize the nighttime stress they felt as they approached deadlines. Cultural commentators have used it to symbolize the kiss of a passionate conductor when talking about the quality of a book, TV show, piece of music, or work of art.

Stranger still were K-Pop’s fandoms, who used it in place of a soon-to-be-implemented emoji, hand with index finger and thumb crossed. This symbol, which is more colloquially known as the “finger heart,” has been used by South Korean celebrities for nearly a decade as a sign of belonging and support. Whether K-Pop fans are ditching pinched fingers in favor of the finger heart emoji will become clearer in a few months, when the latest Unicode update, containing Emoji 14.0, is deployed on devices.

Whatever emoji K-Pop fans decide to use, they will have a disproportionate impact on official records of the use of these symbols, according to those who monitor emoji use on social media. “At Emojipedia, we’ve seen other prominent examples of this within K-Pop only through our own research on Twitter,” says Keith Broni, deputy emoji manager of Emojipedia, “with purple heart and heart green used to a significant degree by fans of the BTS and NCT bands, respectively.

Then there are the crypto brothers. The rubbing of the thumb on the fingers in a pinching motion is a universal sign of wanting or having money – and few people like to flaunt their wealth more than the new generation of cryptocurrency millionaires. “I was surprised when we saw a topic on our model clearly related to cryptocurrencies,” Garcia admits. “I knew 🤌 could be used to talk about money and that cryptocurrencies were a hot topic lately, but I didn’t expect to see it popping up so regularly. in computer analysis like ours.

Wider change

The rise of pinched-finger emoji echoed a larger shift in our use of emoji during the pandemic. Garcia and his colleagues have studied the ratio of hand emojis use to face emojis rollout since early 2019. They found that hand emojis were an increasingly high proportion of all. emojis used after the pandemic than before the pandemic. compared to face-based emoji.

On Twitter in English, for example, the ratio of hand emoji to facial emoji increased by 24% after March 2020. Not surprisingly, says Luca Vullo, writer, director and filmmaker from Sicily, Italy , which produced a 2012 documentary titled La Voce Del Corpo (Where The voice of the body).

“The idea of ​​this kind of emoji is to put the emotional part into the conversation and understand the real intention of the person,” says Vullo, who also runs courses for actors, including those at the National Theater of the UK, on ​​how to gesticulate to add meaning. “You have to hear the voice of the body.

And it’s more important than ever when we wear masks that cover a large part of our faces, and therefore protect most of our expressions. Before taking on the study, Garcia was sitting in a barbershop in Austria when he began to think about why hand-based emoji have become more popular. “I noticed that hand signs replaced facial expressions when people interacted in stores or on public transportation,” Garcia explains.

“A die the reasons why we review social media The data it is because it often reflects our offline behaviour.”

“One of the reasons we look at social media data is that it often reflects our behavior offline,” he continues. “We thought it could happen online: The frequency of hand emojis is increasing compared to facial emojis. “

A place where the proportion of gesture-based emoji hasn’t increased compared to more expressive facial emoji? Japan, where the wearing of public masks was relatively common even before the pandemic.

The way the emoji was incorporated into posts and the emotions it attempted to express also differed significantly across the world. “We noticed quite a wide variation in the sense of context in which the emoji was used, from very positive in Japanese to quite negative in Italian and Spanish, corresponding to what we noticed when we looked at the text ‘that accompanied the ’emoji, Garcia explains.

Nor is this news for Vullo, whose flamboyant Italian posturing – seriously, check out his website – risks being misinterpreted elsewhere in the world. “Every population in the world has a specific code and grammar,” says Vullo. “It is impossible to think that everyone can understand Italian gestures in the world.”

Garcia also found that the meaning of symbols like pinched fingers was harder to pin down than facial emojis. “Emoji can be a way to measure emotional expression across languages, but only if we focus on fairly simple facial expressions of emotions,” he says. “More nuanced signs like 🤌 tell us a story of variety.”