They literally could add emojis to that list without any problem. The BIP 39 primarily stipulates 2048 symbols and there is at least that many emojis, and most of them are only 2 UTF bytes long. Here is the full UTF8 emoji set as current:

https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-counts.html

Over 2048 of them.

l0k18

How might someone memorize their seed if they aren't comfortable with recognizing 12 English words? Is there an alternative BIP39 encoding that's popular in non-english regions?

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md

bitcoin

Any research on "Bitcoin Culture" in China?

nullcount

>How might someone memorize their seed if they aren't comfortable with recognizing 12 English words? Is there an alternative BIP39 encoding that's popular in non-english regions?

This one I can answer. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md 

You got:

English
Japanese
Korean
Spanish
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
French
Italian
Czech
Portuguese