I'm not the gp, but I think I can explain. Emoji isn't your prototypical "what you learn in school" language, but there is a huge amount of language that you do

I'm not the gp, but I think I can explain. Emoji isn't your prototypical "what you learn in school" language, but there is a huge amount of language that you don't learn in school. Emoji is kind of like non-verbal communication, which is language. Also some emoji is certainly more language-y than others. Here's why: 1. Emoji only typically exists in the written form, but that isn't really a strike against it: paragraphs, capital letters, and (to some extent) word-breaks only exist in the written form too. 2. They have a conceptual existence, and communicative force, that is separate from any particular representation. You can't copy-write the smiley grapheme. You could copy-write a particular smiley image (or "graph"), much like you could copy-write a glyph, but that's it.