The Universal Visual Language and The Emoji Alphabet

Posted On 13/10/2025

By Nikki Wordsmith
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WhatsApp: 07905 456704

The Emoji Alphabet: A Simple and Sensible System for the Universal Visual Language

1 Imagine a world where letters and words are fun, meaningful and easy to learn based on all our senses, especially our visual ones.

2 And everyone else in the whole wide world automatically understands the look, sound and sense of these letters and words too.

3 Approximately the same 3,000 everyday words are used around the globe.

These are the three driving principles of The Universal Language and The Emoji Alphabet.

The Emoji Alphabet

One of the foundations of this new visual language system is The Emoji Alphabet.

Each of the 26 English letters gets its own emoji, matched by sound. So, “A” is an apple, “B” is a bee, “C” is a cat, “D” is a dog, all the way to “Z” for zebra.

And it is designed as support and bridging communciation tool for the 7,000 different languages that we currently all speak around the world.

It’s like a global handshake, headnod and hum of agreement all rolled into one — simple, visual, and accessible to all.

Since most of us — about 65%, says learning research like the VARK model — think better with pictures, this taps into how our brains naturally love images over text.

From the first handprints on cave walls to the intricate scripts of ancient civilizations, us humans have always sought to leave marks that speak.

Symbols preceded writing—abstract shapes, animal forms, and celestial signs conveyed emotion, ritual, and memory. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs formalized this impulse, turning image into language.

Across cultures, alphabets evolved, yet the symbolic urge persisted: runes, ideograms, pictographs. These weren’t just tools—they were bridges between minds, across time.

Whether carved in stone or encoded in pixels, our symbols carry stories, beliefs, and longing. Communication is not just transmission—it’s communion, a shared breath between the seen and the felt.

Signs and symbols have long since fascinated me. My undergraduate dissertation was on the Origin of Art with Professor Steve Mithen. He came up with a brilliant music commuication theory called The Singing Neanderthals. More on this later…

During this time, palaeontologist Richard Leakey brought out his book The Origin of Humankind (1994) a key turning point from man the hunter towards cooperation, adaptability, intelligence and crucially consciousness and symbolic thought.

Being the half-baked student that I was back then — well it was the 90s! — I didn’t read that book.

A year later Phoenix brought out a pocket book version of the first two chapters.

In this second chapter The Language of Art, Leakey viewed language and art and symbols as all interconnected expressions of a fully developed human mind.

He wrote: “Language is not merely a vocal act; it is a symphony of the senses – sight, sound, touch, and even the feel of the air, as we shape words, all woven together to create the rich tapestry of human expression.”

To this day, these 21 pages are never very far away from me. It was the best 60p I ever spent.

Much more coming soon…

Please feel free to subscribe follow along on our creative journey. I am also regularly posting on Zora, our chosen cultural ledger for this project.

Get your family and friends to guess The Emoji Alphabet

Nikki Wordsmith 
Made in Lancashire
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