Emoji is now an important part of our messaging culture, and while there’s a lot of emoji available – there’s always room for more. The Unicode Consortium, the gatekeepers of new emoji, have now released a list of proposed emoji that could appear on your phone next year.
The proposed emoji have been shortlisted for the Emoji 12.0 spec which will be finalised for release in 2019. The list of proposed emoji includes 179 emoji in total, comprising 61 characters with variants (gender, skin tone etc.).
Included in the list are new animals (Skunk, Sloth, Otter and more), food (Onion, Falaffel, Waffle, Oyster and more), and individual additons in categories like Parachute. An emoji for ‘couple holding hands’ also will be introduced, with the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) recently adding 55 combinations of skin tone and gender.
There will be a big focus on inclusion for differently abled people including the addition of a new people emoji for a deaf person as well as a separate emoji for a hearing aid. A ‘Guide Dog’ and service animal emoji are now there and so are emoji for a mechanical arm and mechanical leg and manual and motoroised wheelchair are there too.
If the 2019 spec isn’t enough to satisfy your emoji needs, they’re already working on the 2020 spec with eight emoji included in the Proposed Spec. The emoji in this spec are Ninja, Military Helmet, Mammoth, Feather, Dodo, Magic Wand, Carpentry Saw and Screwdriver.
The emoji proposed for the Emoji 12.0 spec will be reviewed and finalised in the next UTC meeting in September, while the proposed emoji for the Emoji 13.0 spec will be looked at between now and March 2019.
Which emoji – besides the obvious sausage roll emoji – do you think we need next?
If the eggplant and peach have taught me anything, it is that an oyster emoji is probably a bad idea/will get used a lot