Another new innovation that texting has brought to the way we communicate, is the emoticon. Emoticons are small sequences of keyboard symbols which are used to convey the writer's emotions, or to convey the tone or mood of a text by making a small face on the screen. They've become very popular, but interestingly enough, the way that we write emoticons in our texts varies hugely around the world.
In the Western world, we write emoticons using the Latin alphabet, keyboard symbols and with the face rotated sideways. :) conveys happiness. :( conveys sadness. :D conveys a big smile etc... Some emoticons use a clever combination of these things to convey specific actions or emotions. ;) shows someone winking. >:( shows a very angry person. :p shows someone sticking their tongue out. But in other countries where English is not the first language, or where the Latin alphabet in not used, texters have still developed unique and interesting emoticons using their own style and alphabet.
The most popular Eastern style emoticon is the Japanese style. These emoticons are not rotated sideways and usually look something like this. (-_-) >.< o_O. While the Japanese style uses mostly keyboard symbols to write emoticons, some other countries have developed emoticons using different alphabets altogether. In Korea, emoticons are written using the Korean Hangul alphabet, and like the Japanese style, the faces are not rotated sideways. Common examples look like this. ㅇㅅㅇ,
ㅇㅂㅇ, ㅇㅁㅇ and -ㅅ-. Like Western emoticons, a mixture of keyboard symbols and the alphabet is used in emoticons. For example, 'ㅅ', "ㅅ", 'ㅂ' and 'ㅇ'. As I was surprised to find out, even the Arabic alphabet can create a huge range of unique emoticons when combined with keyboard symbols.
Sources:
http://www.gomotes.com/emoticon-dictionary/
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