Investigating the Linguistic Functions of Emojis in the Twitter Social Network

The ever-increasing development of the Internet and the creation of emojis has led to the emergence and development of a new language for the new generation of communication and facilitating human interactions in the context of social networks. The purpose of this research was to investigate the types of linguistic functions of emojis on Twitter based on the approach of Haring and Dinas (2017), which was carried out and discussed with the method of quantitative content analysis. By selecting the top three hashtags in each of the social, economic, culture and health fields, 5000 tweets were selected as the statistical population and among them, 1200 tweets were randomly selected from male and female users and in the time frame. Six months from March 1399 to September 1400 were selected as a sample and coded using Maxqda software, the share of each domain was 300 tweets. Based on the results, in total, the tweets had the highest frequency of occurrence in the order of interpretive, emotional, polite, emphatic, structural, communicative and referential functions.