The list also includes a person in a veil, a pinched finger gesture, hugging people, bubble tea and bottle-feeding parents. Photo / Supplied
The list also includes a person in a veil, a pinched finger gesture, hugging people, bubble tea and bottle-feeding parents. Photo / Supplied
The transgender flag, a woman in a tuxedo, and a gender-neutral alternative to Santa Claus will all be represented in new emoji to be released in 2020.
In total, 117 new characters and images have been approved for addition to the emoji library, regulator the Unicode Consortium announced.
The list also includes a person in a veil, a pinched finger gesture, hugging people, bubble tea and bottle-feeding parents.
The Unicode Consortium's list is the central bank of approved emoji, with companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft then applying stylised versions of the designs to their own operating systems.
Last year, a number of same-sex couple and gender-neutral emoji were added to the library to improve representation, but there was criticism over the non-inclusion of the transgender flag – which has now been added alongside the transgender symbol.
Jeff Ingold, head of media engagement at LGBT campaigns group Stonewall, said: "Taking action to make tools of communication, like emojis, more inclusive and diverse is always a welcome step.
"So we're glad to see the inclusion of more gender-neutral emojis and a trans flag emoji. Visibility is really important and companies can always be thinking of more ways to promote trans equality."
Also among the list of approved emoji is a ninja, a black cat emoji, a bison and a mammoth.
Some of the new emoji to be rolled out in 2020. Photo / Supplied
In November, Philip Seargeant, a senior lecturer of applied linguistics at the Open University, compared emojis to hieroglyphics and said they should become a "serious area of study".
"There is definitely a build up of serious work being done about [emojis] and people studying it. I think in the past, people found it interesting to teach as a slightly unusual youth culture type thing," he said.
"But now there is a serious aspect to it, as it is penetrating into so many other ways in which we communicate."
No release dates have been confirmed for the new emoji on different operating systems, although they are traditionally rolled out later in the year when new versions of Apple's iOS and Google's Android software are released to the public.
How are new emoji introduced?
Anyone wanting to "sponsor" a new emoji character has to put together a detailed written proposal and submit it to the Unicode Consortium.
Each proposal received will be evaluated initially by technical officers at Unicode. Once a proposal passes this initial screening, it will be reviewed by the Unicode Technical Committee.
Sponsors may be required to revise their proposals several times before their character can be encoded. This can take two years or more.
Once the Unicode Consortium encodes an emoji character, it is up to "platform vendors" like Apple, Google and Microsoft to design their own interpretation of the character based on Unicode's brief.
The new emoji will be released on phones and other platforms as part of normal software release cycles. This may take up to a year after a character has been encoded.
