Unicode from a Linguistic Point of View

International audienceIn this paper we describe and comment, from a linguistic point of view, Unicode notions pertaining to writing. After comparing characters with graphemes, glyphs with graphs and basic shapes, character general categories with grapheme classes, and character strings with graphemic sequences, we discuss two issues: the phenomenon of ligatures that stand at the boundary between graphemics and graphetics, and the proposal for the introduction of "QID emojis" which may end up being a turning point in human communication