diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 7c730978..d8abc0b5 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -18,6 +18,7 @@ The espeak-ng project is a fork of the espeak project.
 *  Group the encoding handling into a single place with a clean interface and tests.
 *  Support all ISO 8859 encodings.
 *  Support for multi-word text replacements in language dictionaries.
+*  Support compiling `_emoji` dictionary files if present.
 
 bug fixes:
 
diff --git a/src/libespeak-ng/compiledict.c b/src/libespeak-ng/compiledict.c
index c339be7f..48c72797 100644
--- a/src/libespeak-ng/compiledict.c
+++ b/src/libespeak-ng/compiledict.c
@@ -1570,6 +1570,7 @@ ESPEAK_NG_API espeak_ng_STATUS espeak_ng_CompileDictionary(const char *dsource,
 		compile_dictlist_file(path, "listx");
 		compile_dictlist_file(path, "list");
 	}
+	compile_dictlist_file(path, "emoji");
 	compile_dictlist_file(path, "extra");
 
 	compile_dictlist_end(f_out);