Entertainment
Does Your Phone Have This Dumpling Emoji?
In honour of World Aids Day (1st December), Durex came up with a campaign to request techies to add a new (ahem) emoji to the list. But more recently, yet another emoji was requested to be added to the digital folio.
A group of food lovers and chefs have petitioned to make the dumpling emoji a reality. It’s true that no amount of emojis can capture and express all the users’ needs and expressions. But still our keyboard is missing out on a lot of food emojis, the dumpling being one of them.
Universalings
Dumplings are one of the most universally scoffed foods in the world. Think about it, it’s not like only the Oriental countries identify with this food, the emoji could very well act as a makeshift Polish peirogi, Indian gujiya, Italian ravioli or even a Russian pelmeni.
So while we’re expressing our love for momo, sui mai and other similar eats with mere words, Taco Bell has flagged off its own race and paid up for adorable little burrito and taco emojis.
How Does It Work?
All the emojis that we see or send have likely been voted upon by the Unicode Consortium and been approved to be uniform across multiple platforms and interfaces.
For example, without the supervision of the Unicode Consortium, an iOS emoji would appear as a jumble on any non-Apple device.
So, who gets to sit on a chair and decide which emoji the world will use? Turns out there are currently 11 voting members who pay a whopping $18,000 (~INR 12,00,000) a year for the honor.
Eight of these eleven voters are U.S. multinational tech companies: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. The other three full voting members are the German software company SAP, the Chinese telecom company Huawei and the government of Oman.
The procedure is rather lengthy and can take over 18 months for an emoji proposal to go through the full approval process, which includes also having to be approved ISO, yet another international standards body. Yeah, your emoji has a secret ISO mark!
Take Action
So if you too feel that your phone needs to know what a dumpling is, simply sign in to Change.org and sign the dumpling emoji petition!
The petitioners will also soon start raising funds on Kickstarter to make the dumpling virtual. Meanwhile, here’s what people have to say regarding this addition to the emoji kin.