What if we chat with nothing but icons?
I know, I know, I’ve witnessed so many rants, particularly from people of the boomers’ generation, complaining about how the correct English language usage is being lost, not only because of so many abbreviations like “IRL,” “OMG,” and missing letters in text messages but also because of the use of “emojis” interspersed with ill-constructed phrases. And of course, the mobile phone appears as the main culprit (followed by the short attention span of the new generations, who are thought to be unable to read a complete book from cover to cover).
In my view, beyond the generation gap, there are much deeper things at stake, especially in a globalized world like ours, with or without pandemics. When those boomers (disclaimer: I’m a boomer myself) complain about incorrect language usage, in more than 95% of cases, they refer to English usage. But are they able to text with academically correct Spanish? Or Polish? Or Arabic? Of course not. The question itself sounds ridiculous.
So, how are we supposed to communicate in international, multilingual settings? Again, the default answer will be that English is a “de facto lingua franca” (not expressed in these words, but you get the idea). So, people of the world, just learn English and we all be okay!
The outrage that this attitude evokes on us, the “other-languages-people” is only surpassed by how impractical it has proved to be during the last 60 years at least. Are we supposed to spend years learning English to participate in international meetings in English, and even then, interact with a handicap (unless we achieve level C2) compared to native English speakers?
Well, are there other options? Let’s see:
One is to have a common second language, like Esperanto. As you know, the international use of Esperanto (the second language for everybody) has been an elusive goal for centuries, with some years full of hope and enthusiasm followed by a complete abandonment of the idea for decades (now we are living an Esperanto revival, with a bit less than a million learners, myself included). One (significant) advantage of Esperanto is that, according to studies, to learn it takes a fraction of the time needed to learn English: you don’t have to learn exceptions (there are none), you don’t have to polish your accent or intonation, and so on. Esperanto is just more efficient than English from the acquisition standpoint. And (yes!) we are not at a disadvantage compared to native English speakers!
Another option is to use electronic translators. Natural Language Processing (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) has reached a point where it has become possible to translate between languages in almost real-time. Obviously, conversations mediated by the translator are unnatural, but at least you can get yourself understood. I remember when I went to Varna, Bulgaria many years ago to a scientific conference (needless to say, talks were in English… sigh) every time we wanted to tour the beautiful city at night, we always asked a Russian fellow who attended the conference to get out with us because the street signs were in Cyrillic, the taxi drivers didn’t speak a word of English (or Spanish, French, etc., only Bulgarian, which is close to Russian). With Google translate, we would have the street signs translated, and with a real-time translator, we would give instructions to taxi drivers.
But the newest and most exciting proposal comes from the KomunIKON association. They propose a simplified language composed entirely of icons, which are more general than emojis (emojis are primarily for adding an emotional or funny twist to a text, not for expressing the content itself).
The KomunIKON language (which is currently under development) is not intended to write novels or even newspapers, but for street or subway signs, danger warnings, and so on, but it can also be used for chatting with their smartphone app, which has been made mainly for demonstration and promotion purposes.
Look at the figure at the top of this post. Isn’t it self-explanatory? I think yes.
I met Cesco Reale, founder of the KomunIKON project, at the Founder Institute acceleration program, Frankfurt chapter (where I graduated in 2020), and he is very passionate about the project. “Look, if we want to be understood in every country of the world, we need to go visual” he told us. And it’s not that Cesco struggles with languages; he is an accomplished polyglot. His French is better than mine despite my six years’ stay in France. Still, KomunIKON's goals are not for Cesco’s needs: KomunIKON is for simple, fast, and direct communication in multicultural environments.
We all know that graphic languages go back to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, so they are even older than symbolic languages based on alphabets, but if we really want to tear down the language barriers in today’s world at the lowest cost, perhaps the way to go is, as Cesco says, to rely on graphic icons.
