Which Gestures Travel, and Which Don’t
By Rita Okonkwo · Presence & Delivery
A gesture that means "everything's fine" in one country can be read as an insult a few hundred miles away. That's more than a folk claim. It's the documented finding of a large field study, and it points to a distinction worth knowing before you speak to an audience whose cultural background you can't assume. The distinction is not "gesture less". It is knowing which kind of gesture you are making.
Two different kinds of gesture
Gesture researchers separate emblems from the co-speech gestures that accompany ordinary talk.
Emblems are conventional gestures with an agreed meaning that can stand in for words: a thumbs-up, the "OK" ring made with thumb and forefinger, a wave goodbye, a finger to the lips for "quiet". Adam Kendon, whose 2004 book is a standard account of gesture as part of speaking, calls these "quotable" gestures, because people can name them and explain what they mean, much as they would a word.1
Co-speech gestures are the rest of what hands do in conversation: shaping the size of something, tracing a path, pointing, and the small rhythmic beats that land on stressed words. They have no fixed dictionary meaning. They take their meaning from the words they accompany. Their link to thinking is covered in gesture is not decoration.
The two kinds travel across cultures very differently, and treating them as one is where the trouble starts.
Emblems are vocabulary
In 1979, Desmond Morris and colleagues published Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, a field study that asked people at locations across Europe and the Mediterranean what a set of common gestures meant to them.2 Gestures assumed to be near-universal turned out to vary sharply, and sometimes to reverse in meaning, across short distances. The "OK" ring, positive in much of the English-speaking world, meant "zero" or "worthless" in some places and carried an obscene meaning in others. The same hand shape could compliment you in one town and insult you in the next.
The lesson is that emblems behave like words. They are conventions learned within a community, and a convention does not come with a guarantee that the next community shares it.
Co-speech gestures travel better, but not perfectly
It is tempting to conclude that everything except emblems is universal. The research does not support that.
Sotaro Kita's 2009 review of cross-cultural variation in speech-accompanying gesture identified four sources of difference.3
Conventions linking a form to a meaning. These explain emblems, and they also affect pointing. Which finger or hand you point with, and what pointing at a person implies, differs between cultures.
How people think about space. Gestures that show location or direction, or that represent time in space, differ with how a culture conceives of direction and position. The side a speaker gestures toward for "the past" or "the future" is not the same everywhere.
The language being spoken. Languages package information about motion differently, for example whether the manner of moving and the path taken are expressed in one phrase or two, and gestures tend to follow the packaging of the speaker's language.
Pragmatics. Cultures differ in how much gesturing is polite, how large a space gestures are expected to occupy, and how nodding is used in conversation.
So co-speech gestures are not culture-free. But they differ from emblems in the way that matters most for a speaker: they carry no fixed meaning of their own. A hand showing "about this big" while you say "a small box" is read through your words. The risk is that a gesture looks unusual or a little larger than local custom, not that it says something you did not intend.
What this means for a speaker
For anyone presenting to an audience whose background they can't assume, at an international conference, on a call across several countries, or in a diverse workplace, the practical distinction is fairly simple.
Be careful with emblems. The deliberate hand signs that stand in for a word or phrase are the ones most likely to be misread, and a few can land as offensive. A thumbs-up or an "OK" sign that feels friendly to you is not a safe bet in front of an unknown room. Say "that's great" instead.
Keep your illustrating gestures. Showing size, shape, direction and sequence with your hands remains useful, because the words around them supply the meaning. Suppressing them costs you more than it protects.
Point with an open hand. In some cultures, pointing directly at a person with one finger is impolite. An open palm gesturing toward someone, or toward a slide, does the same job with less risk.
Calibrate the size. If you are used to large gestures and the audience's norms are more restrained, or the other way round, adjust the scale of your movement rather than its content.
Ask, when you can. If you will be speaking regularly to a particular audience, a colleague from that culture can tell you in two minutes which gestures to avoid. That is faster and more reliable than any general list.
The advice, in short, is to know which kind of gesture you are using rather than to gesture less. The research on gesture's role in thinking argues strongly against stilling your hands altogether. The narrower caution is about conventional signs, which are vocabulary and should be treated like vocabulary: check that the room speaks it before you use it.
References
- Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge University Press. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL13632882W
- Morris, D., Collett, P., Marsh, P., & O’Shaughnessy, M. (1979). Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution. Stein and Day. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL104125W
- Kita, S. (2009). Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(2), 145–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960802586188