The team also found that the top 20 emojis fall into the categories of face, heart and hand, which suggest `expressions and body signals play an important role in expressing ideas`.
The study, believed to `the first large-scale analysis of emoji usage`, was conducted by the University of Michigan.
Researcher used the app Kika Emoji Keyboard to gather data from 427 million messages from nearly 4 million smartphone users in 212 countries and regions across the world to see if emoji use was universal or varied depending on location and culture.
`Emojis are everywhere. They are becoming the ubiquitous language that bridges everyone across different cultures,` says Wei Ai, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information.
During this study, Ai and his colleagues discovered that out of the 1,281 available emojis, only 119 `constitute around 90 percent of usage`.
However, there are a few countries that don`t favor the face with tears of joy.
According to the findings, the French prefer to use the heart emoji and it was found that about 20 percent of the messages sent from users in the country include at least one symbol.
`It is interesting to see that the top 10 emojis in France are also quite different from those used by other countries, i.e., they are more likely to use emojis related to hearts, while users from other countries prefer emojis related to faces,` the researchers share in the study published in ACM Digital Library.
The team also investigated other culture presences in using the tiny pictures.
It was found that the countries with high levels of individualism, like Australia, France and the Czech Republic, prefer to add happy emojis to their messages.
On the other hand, sad emojis are more popular in places like Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia where ties between individuals are integrated and tight.
The team also found that those live in societies where virtues are linked to future rewards, like France, Hungry and Ukraine, are less likely to choose negative emojis, compared to those who have more respect for past traditions.
`Our report shows that users from different countries can have various preferences to use emojis,` says Qiaozhu Mei, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
`The rank of emojis shown in the input methods should be country-aware to users.`
The team believes these input methods could be used to develop relevant `next-to-use` emojis for users.
In addition to analyzing location and culture, the study investigated which gender users shares more emojis.
Researchers found 68.3 percent of the users are female, compared to the 31.7 percent that are male.
And 74.3 percent are under the age of 25.
More about:
