When in Rome, try your hand at 22 gestures per 100 words. Italians have a saying. “A gesture,” they begin, probably while waving a hand for emphasis, “is worth more than a thousand words.” Italians have (to little surprise) been found to be more expressive than the rest of us.
Roberto Mancini, former manager of the national football team, show off Italians’ love of gesturing
Italians have a saying. “A gesture,” they begin, probably while waving a hand for emphasis, “is worth more than a thousand words.” We instead say it is a picture that is worth a thousand words — while words, according to stereotype, come largely unadorned by hand movements.
A study has validated this stereotype. When telling stories, scientists have found, that hot-blooded Italians use twice as many gestures as more sober Swedes.
For every five words an Italian says, the research discovered, there is one accompanying hand movement — one finger held to thumb for emphasis, one palm raised up for emotion, one hand thrust for dramatic effect, or one of the hundreds of other gestures that have been catalogued by semioticians.
The findings, said Maria Graziano and Marianne Gullberg, from Lund University in Sweden, helped confirm their own anecdotal observations. “Italian speakers are proverbially known for not being able to talk without moving their hands. In contrast, northern European speakers are generally described as being reserved, thus less prone to the use of bodily movements,” they wrote.
The stereotype of the physically expressive Italian is an old one. From the gesticulations of Caesar when he addressed his troops after crossing the Rubicon, to the gesticulations of Giorgia Meloni when she, too, came to power in Rome; from the hand motions of Vito Corleone in The Godfather that determined the fate of his friends and enemies to the hand motions of Sophia Loren that helped her seduce the world, the hand gesture is seen as integral to the nation’s culture.
In 1832 Andrea de Jorio, a Neapolitan priest, even wrote a guide for “those born in distant regions,” to help them understand the meaning of an Italian’s hands. He feared that northerners, “on account of their cool and sluggish temperament, are rather unused to gesturing”.
So he helped them out with a lexicon explaining how to express rage (“tearing one’s hair,” “gnashing one’s teeth with wide open lips”), how to ask to go slowly (“hand turned down and extended forward”), and some of the many ways to describe a cuckold (“index and little finger extended, the remaining middle and ring fingers folded and pressed on the thumb”).
But is the overexpressive Italian just, in fact, a hackneyed trope? Not according to the latest research, published in the journal Frontiers in Communication, which was titled “Providing evidence for a well-worn stereotype: Italians and Swedes do gesture differently”.
It compared 12 Italians to 12 cool and sluggish Swedes. All were told to watch a 90-second clip of the children’s animation Pingu and then describe it to someone. While they did so they were filmed and their gestures closely analysed.
Through the course of the experiment there were 698 Italian gestures, compared to 389 Swedish ones. They were also notably different.
Swedish gestures more often related to representations of specific actions in the story, whereas Italian ones were more about understanding the story at a higher level.
“This indicates that Italians and Swedes adopt different rhetorical styles in telling a story and that they conceptualise it in a different way,” Graziano said. “Gestures are produced in all languages and cultures, and they are not a mere embellishment of speech; they are closely related to what we are saying and how we want to say it.”
Italians gesture in a different way to Swedes when telling the same story
She and her colleague said that more work was needed, to gain a proper cross-linguistic understanding of the value of gestures.
In a gestural language that is so rich in, for instance, different ways of describing phalluses and what you can do with them, a clip of a children’s cartoon probably did not give the native speakers full linguistic freedom.
At the very least, it would be useful to gain a sense of the frequency with which the most severe gesture in De Jorio’s chapter titled “Derision, Ridicule” is used today.
When wishing to strongly express your disapproval of an interlocutor, the priest said, the palm of the hand should be “placed under the armpit of the opposite arm. The hand is arranged so that, when compressed with violent blows given to it by the arm … the air trapped there is pushed out by the force of the blows.”
When performed by a skilled practitioner this produces, he explained, a satisfying raspberry sound.
If your wish is to even more firmly underline your displeasure, he added, “more emphasis is given to this gesture by lifting a little the leg corresponding to the arm that presses the hand”.
Tom Whipple, Tuesday March 26 2024, 6.15am GMT, The Times