The international study looked at how emoji usage and meaning can vary across different countries, and at emoji use in the workplace.

For global companies, results showed that emoji may be an easy source of miscommunication — as the meanings can differ greatly depending on where someone is from.

When shown “face throwing a kiss (😘), U.S. respondents were slightly more likely to use it in a romantic way than in a platonic way (34% vs. 26%) — as were Indian respondents (52% vs. 27%), Japan was the opposite: three in 10 Japanese respondents use the kissy face in a platonic sense, compared to 16% who use it romantically.

Do emoji belong in the workplace? The survey showed there’s still a wide range of benefits:

58% of global employees surveyed said using emoji at work allows them to communicate more nuance with fewer words, and 55% said emoji use can speed up workplace communication.

Notably, this was higher in the U.S. — 69% of American respondents said emoji allowed them to communicate in a more nuanced way, while 67% said it sped up communication.

“It’s clear from the results that people are using emoji like any other system of communication: meaning can be subtle, and they’re used differently in various settings,” said Dr. Hope Wilson, Learning and Curriculum Manager at Duolingo.

“Emoji let people convey a broad range of emotions efficiently, and in a way that words sometimes can’t, said Olivia Grace, Senior Director of Product Management at Slack.