Talk:Emoji/Archives/2021/February

We're not in Japan, the plural for emoji is emojis

I've never since the dawn of emojis heard an English speaker refer to multiple emojis as "emoji." Why does this Wikipedia page insist on calling them emoji instead of emojis? Dapperedavid (talk) 11:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

If you do a text search through the article, you'll find examples of both uses. I don't think there's an established style either on Wikipedia as a whole or in this article specifically.

As for why "emoji" is sometimes used as an invariant plural (cf., two fish/two fishes), per the Unicode Consortium's emoji FAQ:

“ A: Both “emoji” and “emojis” are considered acceptable pluralizations of the word emoji in written English. Unicode uses “emoji” as the plural due to the Japanese origin of this word. Other publications such as the Associated Press Stylebook recommend “emojis” as the English plural.

—https://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html

”

Similarly, dictionary sources such as Cambridge Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster list the plural as "emoji or emojis".

As for this article specifically, as I said, it uses both. As for why, I cannot speak for other article contributors who might have used either formulation. What I can say is that I've personally tended to either use "emoji" as an invariant plural or bypass the issue with "emoji characters" in my own edits, since that seemed more appropriate (both due to being a Japanese word, and due to -i normally being a plural suffix already in English, such that a plural ending in -is feels wrong). Though I might not be representative of a typical speaker since:

• (a) I was taught classical Latin pronunciation as opposed to anglicised Latin pronunciation, hence an -i suffix pronounced like /iː/ still feels like the plural suffix, and I'll sometimes pronounce the plural suffix like that even in English.
• (b) I'm half-Japanese (though English is my sole "mother" tongue, and I'm born, raised and situated in England) and continue to speak of /ɛmɔd͡ʒi/ rather than /ɪmə͡ud͡ʒi/, for example.

— HarJIT (talk) 13:40, 4 February 2021 (UTC)