World Emoji Day: There are New Differently Abled, Food, Animal and Saree Emojis Coming to Your iPhone

Emojis, a language in their own right. To celebrate the World Emoji Day, Apple has confirmed the new Emojis that will be coming to your iPhone later this year. And these new additions are all about inclusiveness. In February, the Emoji 12.0 package was finalized by the Unicode Consortium. Apple says the new Emojis include the Holding Hands emoji as well.

Speaking of the Holding Hands emoji, Apple confirms that users will be able to select any combination of skin tone as well as gender and personalize the emoji into as many as 75 possible combinations. Apple had also proposed to the Unicode Consortium last year to include disability-themed emojis, and that means the next line-up of Emojis will include a guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid, wheelchairs, a prosthetic arm and a prosthetic leg.

Apart from humans, there is focus on activities too. There will be new emojis for a parachute, flying a kite, playing the banjo and a very cool yo-yo. There is also a new emoji for a yawning face (much needed, in our opinion) as well as a swimsuit and a high visibility jacket.

Food has not been neglected either. There are emojis for waffles, falafel, butter and garlic. The new emoji line-up for your iPhone will also include new animal representations, including an orangutan, a flamingo, skunk and sloth.

Apple says the 59 new emojis will be rolled out as a software update this fall, and will be available for the iPhone (iOS), iPad (iPadOS), Macs (macOS) and the Apple Watch (watchOS).

In India, perhaps the additions of the emoji for the Hindu temple as well as the sari might prove to be quite interesting. It was submitted to the Unicode Consortium 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. 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.