Your action can speak louder than your words. It is important to know another language and how to communicate without words when you are in another country. Before saying anything, people communicate with each other by using gestures(手势). However, many gestures have different meanings, or no meaning at all, in different parts of the world.

In the United States, nodding your head up and down means “yes”, while in some parts of Greece and Turkey, it means “no”. In the southeast of Asia, it is a polite way of saying “I heard you”.

Today in the USA, when someone puts his thumb(大拇指) up, it means “Everything is all right.” However, in Greece it is bad manners to do so. Also putting your clasped(紧握的)hands up above your head means “I am the winner.” It is the sign which players often make. In Russia it is the sign of friendship.

In the USA, holding your hand up with the thumb and index finger(食指)in a circle, and the other three straight means “Everything is OK.” In France, it means “You are worth nothing.”

It is also important to make eye communication. If you look down when talking to an American, he or she may feel that you are shy, or you are trying to hide something.

Besides these, you should also know there are some topics that can not be talked about, such as age, weight and marriage. You can talk about the weather, work, sports, food, where one lives and news of the day.

When I mentioned to some friends that we all have accents, most of them proudly replied, “Well, I speak perfect English/Chinese/etc.” But this kind of answer misses the point.

More often than not, what we mean when we say someone “has an accent” is that their accent is different from the local one, or that pronunciations are different from our own. But this definition of accents is limiting and could give rise to prejudice (偏见). Funnily enough, in terms of the language study, every person speaks with an accent. It is the regular differences in how we produce sounds that define our accents. Even if you don’t hear it yourself, you speak with some sort of accent. In this sense, it’s pointless to point out that someone “has an accent”. We all do!

Every person speaks a dialect, too. In the field of language study, a dialect is a version of a language that is characterized by its variations of structure, phrases and words. For instance, “You got eat or not?” (meaning “Have you eaten?”) is an acceptable and understood question in Singapore Oral English. The fact that this expression would cause a standard American English speaker to take pause doesn’t mean that Singapore Oral English is “wrong” or “ungrammatical”. The sentence is well-formed and clearly communicative, according to native Singapore English speakers’ solid system of grammar. Why should it be wrong just because it’s different?

We need to move beyond a narrow conception of accent s and dialects — for the benefit of everyone. Language differences like these provide insights into people’s cultural experiences and backgrounds. In a global age, the way one speaks is a distinct part of one’s identity. Most people would be happy to talk about the cultures behind their speech. We’d learn more about the world we live in and make friends along the way.

When the first digital emoticon “:-)” was posted on Sept 19, 1982, by professor Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University, US, internet history was made. Now, there are more than 3,600 emojis available for us, noted CNN.

“They offer things that words aren’t saying. They clarify that when you say ‘okay’, what kind of okay that is.” Jennifer Daniel—head of the Emoji Subcommittee for the Unicode Consortium, an organization in charge of choosing official emojis—told CNN. Daniel went on to say that emojis add natural elements of face-to-face communication to conversations, such as body language, intonation, volume and eye contact.

But the meanings of emojis are quite different geographically. For example, people in the West prefer to express their feelings through the mouth and chin; so, to show happiness, they often put great emphasis on the corners of the mouth turning up. But in the East, people are more emotionally restrained and their emotions are shown through the eyes instead.

Emojis can be used differently even within the same country. A smiley face with a waving hand is one such example. For most people, this kind of emoji is friendly while some young people use it to show the breakup of a relationship.

Just as language develops, so do emojis. The Unicode Consortium brings out new emojis every year, showing care when it comes to race, gender and other sensitive aspects in new emoji sets. In 2015, it released different skin tones. In 2016, different job emojis were added, such as teacher and firefighter—along with female versions for these jobs. In 2019, emojis of disabled people were added, including emojis of blind people and people in wheelchairs.

What is the future for emojis? They are already shaping social media as existing and new platforms evolve to respond to their expanding uses. Will the emoji evolve to become an international language with the growth of digitalization (数字化)? Or is technology changing so fast that emojis could go the way of the emoticon and fade in popularity after the next big thing comes along? It is hard to predict—even technology and language experts are divided on the subject.