This is the world's favourite emoji

The smartphone and messaging era has changed the way we communicate. While most netizens (read me) were trying to get over those annoying Internet acronyms, abbreviations and text message jargon, emojis came to the rescue. Today, one of the best ways to express your feelings is using an emoji. The ubiquitous language of emojis has been helping bridge different cultures.

 

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Peeking University have taken the trouble to analyse the use of emojis, depending upon regions. The research involves 427 million messages that were sent from nearly four million smartphone users in 212 countries. Here's what they found out.

 

The emoji face with tears of joy is the most popular across the world. The face with tears of joy emoji accounted to 15.4 percent of the total symbols in the study. 

 

 

And those lovers who frequently sent out hearts and eyes filled with love emojis will be glad to know that these follow just next in the line. The finding has revealed that the French love using emojis the most, accounting to nearly 20 percent of messages. They are followed by Russians and Americans.

 

Interestingly, French use icons associated with heart while people from other countries prefer faces. The research says countries like Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina use more negative emojis compared to Turkey, France and Russia.

 

The researchers used the "Kika Emoji Keyboard" app available in 60 languages to see if emoji usage was universal or differed depending upon culture and location.