How do new communication tools like emojis impact the development of language?

Gia (Sarah Mitich) teaches Belter to Havelock (Jay Hernandez)

How languages change is a very complicated question. There are a lot of factors that go into it, but there is one factor that the layman expects to play a much bigger role than it actually does, and that’s orthography, or how the language is written. Advances in communication technology (from the written word itself, to paper, the printing press, telegraph, radio, TV, internet, etc.) certainly do allow languages to spread more widely and quickly, and have allowed for more registers (both formal and informal) to emerge, but these are issues of quantity, not quality; though I must admit that widespread languages have a greater effect on other languages. As for emoji, they are a non-linguistic signal, like one’s tone of voice in English, or body language. Of course, there are languages which use these things as linguistic features (tones in Chinese, gesture in sign language), but at this point, they change drastically in production, becoming much more systematic and consistent, and at the processing level in the brain. I suppose this means that one day a real emoji language could emerge, but I can’t imagine what context would produce that.