Emojis Usage by HEIs in China

With the rise of digital communication, emojis have emerged as a popular and expressive tool for users to convey their thoughts and feelings. Although existing research has offered valuable insights into the interpretation of messages containing emojis, there remains a paucity of linguistic research exploring emoji usage by organizations, especially higher education institutions, on Chinese social media. To address this gap, we gathered posts containing emojis from 10 universities on Sina Weibo, a mainstream Chinese social media platform. We then coded, categorized, and analyzed these emojis according to their speech acts and pragmatic functions.