Canadians top the world in smiling poop emoji use, report finds

A new report on the popularity of specific emojis by country reveals that Canadians may not be quite as polite as our reputation suggests.

In fact, we're twice as likely to use "raunchy" emojis in personal communications than residents of any other country — and our rates of "violent" emoji usage are the highest in the entire world, at more than double the average.

We also like the smiling poop emoji. A lot.

These are but a few of the insights gleaned from ​a comprehensive international mobile language report published on Tuesday by SwiftKey, a British technology firm that develops smartphone keyboard software. 

In its 18 page "emoji report," SwiftKey analyzed more than one billion pieces of emoji data from 16 different regions and languages across the world sent between October 2014 and January 2015.

Researchers broke the more than 800 emojis available on the Unicode standard keyboard into 60 different categories and then analyzed rates of use to determine "language leaders" for each category.

The report's "findings of note" section indicates that when it comes to romance, French speakers lead the pack by using four times as many heart emojis as speakers of any other language.

Australians were found to use the most alcohol and drug emojis, Arabic speakers love flowers and plants, and Americans hold the top spot in a "random assortment of emoji & categories, including skulls, birthday cake, fire, tech, LGBT, meat and female-oriented emoji."

​Emoji use in Canada

According to Canadian emoji use, ours is the land of guns, eggplants and smiling poop.

"Canada scores highest for interests some might consider more 'American', including guns & violent emoji (1.52% vs .97% avg), money (.47% vs .25% avg) and raunchy humour (.28% vs .14% avg)," the report reads.

Under the "raunchy" category, SwiftKey lists such emojis as banana, raised fist, eggplant, peach, cherries and the Cancer astrological symbol.

Canadian English speakers are also the "most violent in their emoji usage (1.52%), which is more than 50% higher than the average" and partial to gun, knife, punching fist, fire, explosion, skull and bomb emojis according to the report.

Judging by the internet's reaction, however, SwiftKey's most significant finding relates to the infamous "smiling pile of poop" emoji.

"Funny emoji (farts and poop) are used by Malaysian speakers at nearly double the average rate," the report notes, though "most of Malay's win comes from the fart emoji... Canadians use the poop emoji most."

SwiftKey provides no hypothesis as to why this may be, but reaction to the news on Twitter shows that many Canadians do indeed love the poop emoji — and are proud to be leading the world in this area.

Writing that the poop emoji "appears to be the visual equivalent of 'eh' for the digital-savvy Canuck," The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi shed some light on how others around the world are viewing Canada in light of these emoji statistics.

"Who would have expected these sort of scatological statistics from Canada? It's supposed to be so polite, so clean and so boring," she wrote. "Well, as you may have already twigged from Canada's most famous export, Justin Bieber, the country has a dark side... As well as being disproportionately fond of faeces, the emoji categories in which Canada leads the world are: violent; body parts; money; sports; raunchy; ocean creatures. There's a Bieber song in that somewhere."