[fnovd]

The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.

[gascoigne]

Not sure if /s, but I recently read about emoji history. It apparently originated from pagers and then "graduated" to phones.

https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/story-of-the-emoji/

Doesn't talk about kaomoji though which I think are supercool. Like this table flip: ( ╯ ° □ ° ） ╯ ︵ ┻ ━ ┻

[adastra22]

Uh, emoji predate pagers and the contributions of the Japanese :)