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

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

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

Read More: Hand Gestures May Have Been the Start of Human Language

Talking with Your Hands Is Universal

We use our hands while we talk to help us think, because there’s a connection between the thinking we’re doing and our hands. It’s a learned behavior that’s also shaped by a particular culture, behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk told Discover.

There’s a lot of variability between the number of hand gestures that a person might use, even within a particular culture. Some people might gesture a lot, and others not so much. Hand gestures may also vary in their size, but all cultures use them.

For example, some cultures like Italy and Turkey use bigger hand gestures, Şeyda Özçalışkan, an assistant professor in Cognitive Sciences whose research focuses on linguistic and cognitive abilities at Georgia State University, told Discover. If the gestures are small, we’re less likely to notice them, but when they’re large, it might seem like you’re gesturing more often.

Research in the journal Cognitive Science shows that, across adults and children speaking different languages, blind versus non-blind individuals, and bilinguals versus monolinguals, when people talk and gesture, their gestures follow the same patterns as their speech. But when they stop talking and just gesture, everybody looks alike, and the differences between languages dissipate, said Özçalışkan.

“Gesture produced with speech is secondary to speech, and since your speech is language specific, so too is your gesture. But when you’re not speaking, gesture become a language of its own, producing a coherence across languages,” Özçalışkan told Discover.

Other universal hand gestures include rapidly holding your hands out, palms facing outward, which means “stop,” said Weinschenk. If you signal for someone to come towards you, that’s also a universal hand gesture. Additionally, pointing is a generally universal hand signal, though it varies across cultures in how polite it is.

“The pointing gesture is a pretty robust phenomenon across languages and cultures,” Özçalışkan said.

She adds that kids start pointing around 11 months of age, which forms the basis of the language learning process. For example, a child will point at something they want, and then the parent will ask if they want a bottle, milk, or a toy, and the child hears and learns the words associated with the object they’re pointing to.

Hand Gestures That Are Not Universal

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

Even head nods for “yes” and “no” can mean different things in different cultures. The peace sign in the U.S. may be equivalent to the middle finger in other cultures, according to the Hartford International University of Religion & Peace.

The thumbs-up may be positive in some cultures and mean “up yours” in others. The horn hand gesture, with both your pinky and pointer finger out, means “rock on” in some cultures and “your wife is cheating on you” in others. So, it’s true, there’s a lot of variability between the cultures, and when you’re traveling abroad, it’s best to be cognizant of it.

But no matter what it means, we all gesture. “We communicate with our whole bodies and our hands are part of that,” Weinschenk said to Discover.

Read More: When Did Humans Evolve Language?

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