很多人在用手机发短信时，经常会在字里行间内加上几个被称作“表情符号”的小图标，这个近来十分流行的新功能不仅能让枯燥无味的文字看起来丰富多彩，还可以快速且高效地向他人传达我们的情感。

Happy, angry, amazed – these are some of the emotions we like to express these days when we're sending a message on our smartphones! That's why many of us now add little pictures to our texts to brighten up someones mobile screen but we're also using them as a quick way of telling someone how we're feeling. Yes, emojis have become a vital tool for communication.

Let's clear one thing up first – there are emojis and emoticons. The latter are little images made using normal keys on a keyboard. For example, a colon, two dots, followed by the curved line of a close brackets is a 'smiley face'. But as technology has become more sophisticated, pre-made images have been created that can be simply added to your messages, which is great!

The emoji was first invented in Japan in the late 1990s and the word 'emoji' comes from the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'character'. The number of different images has dramatically increased since then and now we have a picture for every mood or situation.

So now we have the option to give this new creation the visual 'thumbs-up' but have you thought (puzzled face) why we've become so addicted to using emojis? Professor Vyv Evans, has written a book called 'The Emoji Code' – he says "increasingly, what we're finding is that digital communication is taking over from certain aspects of face-to-face interaction… one of the reasons emojis are so interesting is that they really do enable us to express our emotional selves much more effectively." So emojis are a sort of substitute for the visual signals or non-verbal cues we normally give when we speak to someone face-to-face.

Another advantage of emojis is that they are an international language – they don't use words but tell a message in pictorial form so they can be easily interpreted whatever your native language. However, the emojis you send need some thought as they can sometimes be misinterpreted – if a friend sends you an emoji of a hammer, you may think he is angry when really he is saying he has hurt himself or he is clumsy!

Emojis are a good way for showing empathy – they are a virtual hug or a flirtatious tease. But as linguist Neil Cohn says, "to many, emoji are an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, they are linguistic Armageddon." It does show there is a lot more to our communication than words alone but does this mean the decline in traditional writing?