Your nationality may influence how much you talk with your hands
When recounting an episode of the children’s TV show Pingu, people from Italy made an average of 22 gestures per 100 words, compared with 11 for Swedish people
By Brian Owens
26 March 2024
A police officer in Rome, Italy, gesturing to a tourist
Jochen Tack/imageBROKER/Alamy
People of different nationalities appear to vary in their use of hand gestures, according to a study that seems to reinforce the idea that Italians, in particular, “talk with their hands”.
Maria Graziano and her colleague Marianne Gullberg, both at Lund University in Sweden, asked 12 people from Sweden and 12 from Italy to describe a clip from the children’s TV show Pingu to a friend who hadn’t seen it, while examining their gestures.
“Italians do gesture more,” says Graziano on a video call, gesturing emphatically herself, which she puts down to her upbringing in Naples, Italy. In the study, the Italians made an average of 22 gestures per 100 words, compared with the Swedes’ 11.
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But more interesting was the difference in the function of the gestures, says Graziano. The Swedes mostly used “representational gestures” to illustrate the events and actions of the story, for example mimicking a rolling pin when describing baking.
The Italians made these motions as well, but also had more “pragmatic gestures” that comment on the story or introduce new information, such as a hand movement to indicate a new character.
