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in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.
in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!
Eh, I feel like we would've adopted our own style by now. For example, this face ^^ was fairly popular in the German internet before mobile phones and emojis took over, because it's just two key presses on the German keyboard.
I think, the main problem is simply that umlauts look like letters to us. If someone types a random Ü or Ö after their sentence, you might think they meant to write another sentence. Or you simply do not register that it's supposed to resemble a face, because it's just a letter in your mind. Much like you presumably don't either look at an E and think that it looks like a rake, because the association with the letter is much stronger.
but i am not talking about emojis… i am talking about emoticons, which came into heavy use in the early 80’s.
in any case, i was trying to be “cute” or cheeky when i suggested that “smilies” didn’t exist in Germany, but i failed to communicate that effectively. perhaps i should’ve used a winky face, or provided a little more context about the origins. sorry about my perceived snarkiness; wasn’t my intent.
EDIT : i am actually struggling to find a reference to “^^” being used by anyone; could you point me to a source, as i am genuinely curious about this
Uh, sure, ^^ has been so popular that even some renowned German news webpages have articles on it:
- https://www.heise.de/tipps-tricks/Was-bedeutet-6268625.html
- https://praxistipps.chip.de/das-bedeutet-dieser-smiley_92160
- https://www.giga.de/extra/netzkultur/specials/was-bedeuten-die-zeichen-im-chat-doppeldach/
Wikipedia also mentions it:
Im Internet werden zwei Zirkumflexe (^^) verwendet, um Freude oder Belustigung über die vorhergehende Aussage auszudrücken. Die beiden Symbole sollen vor Kichern zwinkernde Augen darstellen. Man findet es in Chatgroups, Foren, MMORPGs und dergleichen
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumflex#Verwendung
I guess, here's some less good English sources, too:
- https://www.quora.com/What-does-mean-in-texting-1
- https://www.askingbox.com/question/what-is-the-meaning-of-superscript-corners-as-smiley
And I'd wager more than 90% of the folks on feddit.org have used ^^ before, if you want to ask real people about it.