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I don't mean this to sound in any way cruel or judgemental, but a very large proportion of the population have very limited literacy skills. Emoji are useful for all users who are writing short, personal messages that might be ambiguous in tone. They are extremely useful for people who would otherwise struggle to express or understand tone and emotion using the written word. In the last National Assessment of Adult L…
> In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that. That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, an…
In a globalised world, a great many people are frequently communicating in a language that they have not fully mastered. South Africa has eleven official languages. India has 22. Globally, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers by two-to-one. Hindi/Urdu has a roughly equal number of first and second language users.