Hand Gestures Aren’t Always Universal — but We All Use Them to Communicate

Many of us speak with our hands, using gestures to emphasize what we are saying. Or we can use hand gestures separately to communicate. Previous studies, including one in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, indicate that hand gestures could have been a means of communication before humans had language.

And while these gestures, ranging from “thumbs up” to “peace sign,” can mean different things in different cultures, the question remains: Are certain hand gestures universal?

Learn more: Hand gestures may have been the start of human language

Speaking with your hands is universal

We use our hands when we speak to help us think, because there is a connection between the thinking we do and our hands. It’s a learned behavior that is also shaped by a particular culture, explains behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk. Discover.

There is great variability in the number of hand gestures a person can use, even within a particular culture. Some people can gesture a lot, and others less. Hand gestures can also vary in size, but all cultures use them.

For example, some cultures like Italy and Turkey use larger hand gestures, said Şeyda Özçalışkan, an assistant professor of cognitive sciences whose research focuses on language and cognitive abilities at Georgia State University. Discover. If gestures are small, we are less likely to notice them, but when they are large, it may seem like you are gesturing more often.

Search in the journal Cognitive sciences shows that, among adults and children speaking different languages, between blind and non-blind people, and between bilinguals and monolinguals, when people speak and gesture, their gestures follow the same patterns as their speech. But when they stop talking and just gesture, everyone looks the same and the differences between languages ​​disappear, Özçalışkan said.

“The gesture produced by speech is secondary to speech, and since your speech is language specific, so is your gesture. But when you don’t speak, gesture becomes a language in its own right, producing coherence between languages,” Özçalışkan said. Discover.

Other universal hand gestures include quickly extending your hands with palms facing outward, meaning “stop,” Weinschenk said. If you’re waving for someone to come towards you, that’s also a universal hand gesture. Additionally, pointing is a generally universal hand signal, although its degree of politeness varies across cultures.

“Finger gesture is a fairly widespread phenomenon in all languages ​​and cultures,” Özçalışkan said.

She adds that children start pointing around the age of 11 months, which forms the basis of the language learning process. For example, a child will point to something they want, then the parent will ask them if they want a bottle, milk, or a toy, and the child will hear and learn the words associated with the object they are pointing to.

Hand gestures that are not universal

Hand gestures that are not universal tend to be culture specific, such as a thumbs up for “OK” or the peace sign. In both cases, they mean one thing in one culture and something completely different in another culture.

Even a nod of “yes” or “no” can mean different things in different cultures. In the United States, the peace sign may be equivalent to the middle finger in other cultures, according to the International University of Religion and Peace in Hartford.

The thumbs up can be positive in some cultures and mean “yours” in others. The horn hand gesture, with the pinky and index fingers extended, means “rock on” in some cultures and “your wife is cheating on you” in others. So it’s true, there is a lot of variability between cultures, and when traveling abroad, it’s best to be aware of that.

But whatever that means, we all make gestures. “We communicate with our whole body and our hands are part of that,” Weinschenk told Discover.

Learn more: When did humans evolve language?

Article sources

Our Discovermagazine.com editors use peer-reviewed research and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review the articles for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. See the sources used below for this article: