Emoji 12 for 2019 is Final: 230 New Emojis, Including Wheelchairs, a Hindu Temple And Orangutans

The much awaited Emoji 12.0 update has been finalized, which means you will soon be able to add value to your conversations with friends and family with even more emojis. There are 59 new emojis as well as 171 variants for gender and skin tone, which makes this a total of 230 new emojis that have been approved for release.

The Unicode Consortium’s Emoji 12.0 package focuses on new emojis that illustrate human disabilities, such as a human ear wearing a hearing aid, a manual wheelchair, a motorised wheelchair and male and female emojis signifying hearing disabilities, communicating with sign language, a male and female with a cane, a male and female in a wheelchair and a guide dog, to name a few. When the beta package for Emoji 12.0 was released in October last year, it was clear that there is greater focus on inclusion and diversity, irrespective of gender.

Apart from humans and focus on activities, the new emoji line-up also includes a lot of new animal representations, including orangutans, flamingos, otters and sloths. The food emoji portfolio also gets a boost with the addition of butter, garlic, onion, waffles, and ice cubes, to name a few.

In India, perhaps the additions of the emoji for a Hindu temple as well as a sari might prove to be quite interesting. It was submitted by Girish Dalvi of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai and Mayank Chaturvedi of the Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha. In their proposal submitted back in 2017, they had said, “at present, the religious places category in the Unicode chart contains emoji for “Church”, “Mosque”, “Synagogue”, “Shinti Shrine”, and “Kaaba”. The list does not contain places of worship for religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent.”

It is the Unicode Consortium’s job to maintain and publish the standards on which new emojis are made. Considering how important emojis have become to communication using various instant messaging apps, these have gained MORE importance now than ever. At present, Apple, Google, Facebook, Adobe, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle, SAP and Shopify are some of the consortium members.

Expect these emojis to be available on Google’s Android phones as well as the Apple iPhone line-up sometime in the next few months.