Ever think about how much of language is non-verbal? We do! Tone of voice, body language, and gestures all contribute significantly to the meaning of what we say–which means that communication is actually a lot more complicated than putting the right words in the right order. Check out Jeff Daitsman’s post on Morris, Collett, Marsh, and O’Shaughnessy’s book about gesture (an idea that originated in the comments on Think Literacy) for more about gestures and exactly where the show up in different cultures.
When TLCThinkLiteracy suggested that I write a blog post about common gestures and their meanings in different languages, I excitedly rummaged through my gesture literature to find the most-cited book dealing with this topic. That book is Gestures: Their origins and distribution by Desmond Morris, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh, and Marie O’Shaughnessy (1979).
This book is primarily an anthropological analysis of emblem gestures used throughout Europe. According to the authors, “Emblems are actions which replace speech and can act as substitutes for verbal statements” (1979, p. xx). Illustrations of the emblem gestures they used for analysis were printed on the back cover of the book, which I have scanned here.
I am currently in the process of analyzing video data that I recorded of eight of my students as part of a research project examining what children’s nonverbal communication reveals about their developing understandings of gender concepts. Out…
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