Emoji are a universal language the same way that pointing at stuff and grunting is a universal language. Useful, under a certain set of circumstances! But what makes language really powerful is its ability to talk about stuff beyond the here and now, beyond the easily visualizable. In other words, abstraction.

And you can’t have something that’s both abstract and universal at the same time. It’s a contradiction. If it’s universally, instantly understandable, it’s got to be really simple. If it’s abstract enough to talk about anything interesting, it gets that way because of a bunch of arbitrary associations of form and meaning that you just have to learn by rote. (It’s not a coincidence that learning about a new topic often involves picking up a bunch of new vocabulary.)

For example, look at the tremendous difficulty that scientists have had in communicating the fairly simple concept DANGER THERE IS NUCLEAR WASTE HERE STAY AWAY in a way that will continue to make sense to humans for the next 10,000 years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the Day of the Dead and/or pirates. Closer to home, there’s a considerable amount of work put into designing universal iconography for international purposes like traffic signs and airports and Olympic events, but even that relies on a mix of shared cultural awareness (e.g. that wavy lines represent water) and just plain arbitrary learning (e.g. that a red octagon means “stop”).

But even if emoji were a language, and even if that language was actually an improvement on English — I can definitely see the pros to a language with a phonetic spelling system and no irregular verbs, for example — that still wouldn’t be enough to cause English to die. In fact, people have designed arguably more logical or efficient languages according to various criteria, such as Lojban which has no ambiguity or Toki Pona which only has 120 base words, and I strongly endorse them as a reason to spend an afternoon reading Wikipedia. But none of them have mounted a serious threat to a natural language. (Esperanto is the conlang that’s caught on most, and it’s not especially logical.)

Thing is, languages don’t live or die on their grammatical merits. I too, enjoy learning about the history of English and the unique quirks of Englishes ’round the world and all the stuff we’ve borrowed from other languages. But there’s nothing about our sounds or our words or our spelling system or our grammar that makes English particularly fit to be a global language. English is a global language because English speakers have been global conquerors. It’s not about the quality of English nouns and verbs, it’s about the quality of English guns and money.

There are, of course, gun and money emoji. But there hasn’t been physical violence inflicted on people who refuse to use them. We can’t say the same for English nouns and verbs.

This gets us finally to the most troubling part — the idea that emoji might cause the death of English is a severe mischaracterization of what it actually looks like when a language dies.

Even if you don’t like a few details of how Young Women These Days are speaking it, a changing language isn’t a dying one, it’s a living one. And we can’t deny that millions of children go to school in English, play at home in English, and will one day be able to get jobs in English, not to mention the further billion or so adults who speak English as a second language.

No, English is in ruddy good health. In fact, it’s not only not under threat, it’s the aggressor. The only problem with English is the way it’s pushing out thousands of smaller languages. You see, it’s not that languages can’t die — quite the contrary. The precise numbers vary, but it’s commonly accepted that of the 7000 or so languages currently being spoken, at least half of them will no longer be active by the end of this century.

There are many reasons that the children of a community may stop speaking the language of their grandparents, whether because they can’t go to school in their mother tongue, because their parents decide that speaking a majority language will help them get a job, because of inaccurate advice that speaking multiple languages to a child will just “confuse” them, or because of governments that literally ban their language from being spoken.

That’s not to say there isn’t hope — language activists have been working on many projects to revitalize endangered languages, and even to reawaken “sleeping” languages from written records into active, daily life in their communities (see the documentary We Still Live Here for one example). It’s challenging work, and chronically under-funded, but it’s happening. And that makes it all the more frustrating when the kind of “language death” that makes the news is hyperbolic techpanic or simplistic language savior narratives.