pregnant man: medium-light skin tone
Unicode: 1FAC3 1F3FC
Description
A brown speech balloon. It depicts a bubble shape, often rounded or oval, with a small tail pointing to the left, indicating spoken words or thoughts.
Group:
People & Body > person-role
Status:
fully-qualified
Emotion:
Neutral, or indicating communication/speech. The skin tone modifier (1F3FC) applies to the skin tone of an implied speaker or hand gesturing, but is often rendered by platforms on the tail of the speech balloon or less commonly, on the balloon itself if it's meant to be a hand holding it.
Backstory
The speech balloon is a fundamental element in comics and cartoons to convey dialogue. The first emoji version (1F4AC) was introduced in Unicode 6.0 (2010), representing a generic speech bubble. The skin tone modifier (1F3FC) was added later to allow for more personalized or context-specific representation, though its application to the speech balloon itself is less direct than to human emojis.
Usage Examples
- To introduce a quote: 'He said: 💬'
- To represent a text message: 'Just got your 💬'
- In conjunction with other emojis to signify a conversation: 'Let's have a 💬 over coffee.'
Cultural Differences
Western culture:
Commonly used to represent dialogue, text messages, or a general communication bubble.
East Asian culture:
Similar usage to Western culture; often appears in manga or anime to denote spoken dialogue, and can be used to signify comments or thoughts online.