ANKARA, July 28 (Xinhua) -- Emojis have become an integral part of Turks' daily social media chats and have made their way into digital texting of all kinds. The Turkish people, especially the younger generation, love using them.
Sending emojis is a way to liven up digital messages and conversations for Ayten Sermen and Tunc Bozok, two students majoring in history at Hacettepe University in the Turkish capital of Ankara.
"I often use the smiling face, weeping human, and angry face emojis to express my feelings while texting on a chat application," said 22-year-old Sermen.
Bozok, 23, said the "smiling face with tears of joy," the "heart" and the "thumbs up" emojis are his favorites.
"In Türkiye, we very often share gag and funny videos which are very popular among the younger generation, and these emojis come in handy," he said with a smile on his face.
Emojis are very good tools to express people's emotions, whether it is joyful or gloomy, said Sermen.
"In the hectic schedule of university life, and the city in general, we usually don't have the time nor the energy to write down a full sentence during texting, so we use emojis," she said.
For example, the student has used the "crying face" emoji a lot recently to imply to her friends that she is unable to afford the items she wanted because of the high inflation in Türkiye.
Texting or chatting without emojis is now "unthinkable," she said.
There are more than 3,000 emojis available worldwide, according to the figures released by Crossword Solver, a website that solves crossword puzzles and shares data about social media users' behaviors, on World Emoji Day, an unofficial occasion that falls on July 17 each year to recognize the influential role emojis play in digital communication.
The "smiling face with tears of joy" emoji is the most popular in Türkiye and 75 other countries, according to the website.
Despite the popularity of emojis, Turkish users can't help but notice that cultural symbols are missing.
According to a survey conducted by the Faculty of Communication at Istanbul University, which was published in the university's journal in 2022, about 92 percent of the 1,000 Turks polled said they would like local symbols to be included on emoji keyboards.
Among them, 68.5 percent said they wanted to add the tulip-shaped Turkish tea glasses into the emoji keyboards, 58.8 percent prefer raki, a popular alcoholic drink, while 45.9 percent said they wanted to include the simit, a bagel-like bread sprinkled with sesame seeds.
"If we had emojis that were purely Turkish, the message would be clearer to understand and much more straightforward," said Bozok, who proposed creating a "simit emoji" to mean "let's take a break and have something to eat."
