"Need to talk to someone about ‘it’?" reads a caption on Facebook ads targeted at New York teens, alongside aubergine and peach emojis. The posts are part of a campaign by NYC Health & Hospitals to increase the number of teens who take advantage of its sexual health centres.

Boomers may be on their way to retirement, but they take pride in staying young – and tech is increasingly a part of that. Canvas8 sat down with Brits between the ages of 50 and 69 to find out what tech they couldn’t live without and how they really feel about devices at the dinner table.

In 2014, a filmmaker retold Beyonce’s ‘Drunk In Love’ through emojis. Trivial though it may seem, it serves to demonstrate the vast variety of emojis available to us. And following the announcement of racially diverse emojis, lesbian emojis are set to join the party too.

The English language is constantly shifting, with merging communities and tech making it evolve faster than ever; 86% of British parents think teens speak a different language on social media. So how can brands use words, emoticons and colloquialisms to better communicate with their audiences?