How people express laughter online has evolved from the old expression “lol” in favor of typing “haha” or inserting an emoji, said Facebook in an online research report, “The Not-So Universal Language of Laughter.”
The study examined Facebook posts and the majority of users (51.4 percent) used “haha” to express mirth. The study found a sparing use of “lol” — only 1.9 percent of examined posts used the expression. In contract, roughly 33 percent of users preferred emoji or “smilies” in showing laughter.
A New Yorker article about the use of different words or an acronyms in the case of “laughing out loud” to describe laughter inspired the Facebook analysis. The commentary noted that “ha” is a Lego-like building block from which users can express levels of laughter — “heh” versus “hahaha.”
While lol may have fallen into disfavor, the easy-to-type acronym has a long history and finally found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011, according to Tech Hive. Along with lol came the emoticon, which was a way to make text-based messages more friendly and humane.
Emoticons, which once conveyed emotion in text — for example, “:D” for laughter — have been turned into more colorful and animated picture icons. Facebook has hundreds of such icons for messages and comments. Emoji are pictograms that emerged from Japanese text culture and, while they look different from Western emoticons, the Facebook study used the term emoji to describe its emoticons.
The Facebook study limited itself to posts and not private messages — possibly because of privacy concerns — and stuck to English laughter slang. Another limit of the study was its examination of Facebook and not Instagram, said the Verge. Instagram slang is distinct from Facebook. For example, Instagrammers often string several emoji together in comments.
