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If you’re sick of the taco emoji, you can have your shawarma.
There are plenty for other areas of the world (who actually uses the guy in the beefeater hat?) but there’s nothing that really says Middle East.
Halla Walla / Via hallawalla.com
Two Dubai-based tech entrepreneurs decided to change that.
Yasmine Rasool, who is Bahraini, and Eriko Varkey, originally from Japan, have both been living in Dubai for eight years. They came up with the Halla Walla emoji app and stickers, hoping to represent what everyday life is really like for young Arabs in the Gulf.
“Every time I was in New York or London, everyone would be like, ‘So, you’re Arab?’” Yasmine said. “And even Eriko, having been an expat in the Middle East, would get a lot of questions about what it’s like over here. So Halla Walla started as a cultural experiment to try to explain to people the richness of the Arab world.”
Halla Walla / Via hallawalla.com
The standard Unicode emojis have become a lot more diverse in recent years. People can choose different skin tones, and we’re finally getting a woman wearing a hijab sometime this year.
The hijab emoji was approved by Unicode following a campaign led by Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old originally from Saudi Arabia.
But Yasmine and Eriko wanted to go even further.
“One of the first things people think of when they think of the Arab world is the hijab,” Yasmine said. “We wanted to capture how diverse our society is. From Saudi Arabia to Qatar to Kuwait to Bahrain, there are all kinds of differences. This region might be small but we’ve got bold personalities.”
Halla Walla / Via hallawalla.com
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