We all love our emojis, they’re just part of how we communicate now but in the future we may be able to go back to the original emoji, the hieroglyph. Egyptologists and digital linguistics are working together bring the expansive pictorial language online.

Hieroglyphs are actually really complex. There are images that stand in for specific things, some that are sounds, and some that modify sounds. Not only that but it was widely used fr many centuries leaving us with a dictionary of that’s somewhere close to 7000 today. The language is being converted to Unicode which is the language of computers, or overlords. Once there, it can be used for a variety of things.

The imitative isn’t just for fun though (although, it is fun). It is to try and preserve ancient and dying languages, a label, which everyone can agree, that hieroglyphs fall under. By digitizing the hope is that they can see modern usage in popular language apps or websites which will encourage people to learn and preserve them.