• Registered: 2009-05-05
  • Posts: 9

Topic: Phonetics and Gestures:

Recently, a friend and I stumbled upon a strange idea. Do the hand gestures of a people who speak a certain language reflect the phonetic sound of that language? For example, Italiano could be descibed as a very waggly, bouncing, wild language, with moments of hanging before the penultimate syllable. Italian hand gestures seem to reflect this; they're wild, all over the place, and completely disorganized. Could this be similar with other languages? if anyone is familiar with hand gestures of people whose first language was anything other than English, please describe them so I can compare them to the phonetics of a language. (ex. since German sounds like a very stern, hard language, are German hand gestures hard, quick, and small?)

  • Registered: 2009-07-06
  • Posts: 5

Re: Phonetics and Gestures:

Hmmm...that is an interesting thought ....

I would think that the gestures are following the cadence and rhythms of the speech for emphasis .

  • Registered: 2009-04-30
  • Posts: 55

Re: Phonetics and Gestures:

It's cute the waggly bouncing Italian body language, it seems that a good part of the Italian language includes body language or a distinctive tone, the same exists in other language but I think it's more apparent in Italian, I guess the gestures are just some personal and cultural touches that you can add to the language.