A What are gestures? Gestures are those movements that we make to help us to say something without using words, or to add something extra to what we are saying with words. For example, many people will point at something with their finger and say “Look there” or “Look at that.” But actually not all of us will want to point, because our family and friends have told us that it is not polite; and this is one of the most important facts about gestures: the actual gestures we use are different from country to country, and they also vary from one group to another even in the same country.

B If we are travelling in a part of the world where we do not know the language, it is natural to use gestures to try to talk to people. It is natural to try to be positive in such a situation, and to use gestures such as the “thumbs-up” gesture (you put your hand out with the fingers closed and the thumb stretched out, pointing upwards) to say that things are all right. But even that very positive gesture which is known in many different countries of the world, can cause offence — for example it is very rude in parts of Iran and Bangladesh. So to make mistakes in our gestures may lead to unfortunate results. We may also make gestures which others will not always like. For example, at the 1968 Olympic Games some of the winning African-American athletes put their closed fists in the air to make the sign known as the “Black Power” sign when they received their prizes, and their team was very unhappy about it. Yet nobody complained when the South African President, Nelson Mandela, made the sign on his visits to America and other countries. He was a hero who had spent twenty-seven years in prison before helping to bring change and peace to his country, so nobody could be unhappy about what he did.

C Some countries use gestures much more than others — Westerners tend to use gestures more than Chinese people, and some Westerners use gestures much more than others. When doing research for his article about gestures (“An Explanatory Study of Body-Accessibility”), Sidney Jourard watched people in cafés in three different countries, and counted how many times people touched each other in one hour. In Puerto Rico, an American colony in the Caribbean, people touched each other 180 times; in Florida, only about 200 kilometres away in the United States, they touched each other twice, and in London, England nobody touched at all. People in northern Europe — Germany, Holland, Britain and Sweden, for example — usually use fewer gestures than people in southern Europe, such as Spain, Greece, France and especially Italy, and the Spanish and Portuguese took their habit of gesturing to Central and South America, where a whole continent has followed their habits. North America, too, perhaps uses rather less expressive gestures than the people to the south. But possibly because it is a mixture of many peoples, it is perhaps “louder” than the English, who were the first Europeans to go there in large numbers to live.

D One of the first things to learn when visiting a foreign country is, of course, greetings. After all, that is the first thing you need to do, and if people decide what they think of you in the first few minutes after they meet you, it is important to get it right. This, unfortunately, is one of the things that changes most from place to place. It is very common in many countries to shake hands on first meeting, and it seems to be becoming quite common even in China, even though it was not the custom in the past.

E But there are many differences, especially where women and men are greeting each other. In some countries men will put their arms around men and women will put their arms around women, but men and women will shake hands, or women will kiss each other on the cheek, or pretend to kiss each other. In many Spanish-speaking countries — but by no means all — a man will hold a woman’s elbows and pretend to kiss first one cheek and then the other. In France this might well happen three or even more times. Among the Fur people of the Sudan, in Africa, it was always the custom in the past, when a man met a woman he knew, that they would walk past each other without looking at each other’s faces, and put one knee on the ground, then, looking in opposite directions, say at least four greetings, such as “Peace be with you, how’s your health, are you well, God be with you.” They might then speak to each other normally for a while, giving each other news about their families and so on, but still looking in opposite directions, before going their different ways, saying “Go in peace. Bless you”, etc. In India, greetings will vary, but a common one is to put the palm of one of your hands against the other one, with the fingers together, and pointing upwards. 

F Almost any part of the body can be used to make meaningful gestures — hands, arms, eyes, ears, nose, head, feet, chest, elbows, shoulders, etc. One of the most expressive is the eyes. English and American people sometimes look up into the air to say that something is silly, or cannot be believed. In the Philippines, people will point to things with their eyes, that is, they will look in the direction of the thing they are “pointing at” and then back. Closing one eye (or “winking”) may mean many different things: in parts of Africa, a parent may wink at a child as a signal to leave the room. In several countries, including Britain, if a person winks, it can mean “I’m not telling the truth, but don’t tell the other people here,” or “It’s only a joke,” or it can be just a kind of greeting. The eyes are especially important because they are always in use, and one of the difficult things to know is how much you should look at the eyes of the person you are speaking to, if at all. Generally, Europeans and North Americans look each other in the eye much more than people in the East, though they can only do it for a time before they stop. If they look at each other too long it becomes unfriendly or embarrassing, but if people never look them in the eye, those people may seem to them to be dishonest or suspicious in some way.

G Food habits also vary greatly across the world. Eating is not really a gesture, perhaps, but it has meaning in the same way that gestures have. In some countries people commonly use their fingers to eat while in other countries it would be considered very rude. In Zaire, in Africa, how you eat is very important, and people will believe you are a better person if you eat correctly; but customs change from person to person, and it is wise to follow the customs of the person you are eating with — if they use their fingers, you should do the same, but only using the right hand. In Indonesia it is important to leave some food on your plate when you have finished eating; if you do not, it is a sign that you want more food. In other places, it is considered impolite to leave any food on the plate. Customs such as these can change over time, of course. For example, it used to be the custom in Spain, even thirty years ago, if you were travelling by train, to offer your food to the other people around you if you were eating (they had to say no, because that was the custom.) But today, now that Spain has a fine, modern train system, most people simply purchase food from the food trolley.

H Many books have been written about gestures, (one of the best is called Manwatching, by Desmond Morris) as it is a fascinating topic. It is a very important part of the English language, and perhaps you should look out for gestures when you are speaking or listening to people speaking English, whether in real life, or on television, or in films.

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