| Speaking Italian With Your Hands |
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It's All in the Hands
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"Intrigued with the non-verbal language prevalent in Italy? It's just as rich as idioms or proverbs."
WHIDDEN39
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Walk down the street of any Italian town today and you might think you've wandered onto the set of a Fellini movie. People everywhere seem to be mumbling to themselves while gesticulating wildly. If you get closer to them, though, you'll notice that they're punctuating a conversation on their telefonini with hand gestures. Mobile telephones are ubiquitous in Italy today, and all those animated discussions are proof positive that Italians express themselves with their hands even while speaking on the phone.
Listening With Your Eyes
Hand signals are a language onto themselves; for instance, commodities brokers on the floor of the stock exchange have a highly codified set of hand signals to communicate. In sports, referees, players, and managers all have their own non-verbal way of talking to each other, whether it's signaling a penalty in soccer, motioning to a teammate, or repositioning a player. There are even organizations such as the Center For Nonverbal Studies that apply scientific study to nonverbal communication, which includes body movements, gestures, and facial expressions.
Italians use body language and hand gestures to punctuate an expression and give it a shading that the word or phrase itself lacks. Non-native speakers of Italian often find talking on the telephone to be the most challenging linguistic task. One reason is that you cannot read lips, which many people do subconsciously (and makes dubbed movies such as La Vita È Bella difficult to watch). But the absence of body language and hand gestures confounds the communication gap. We watch people motion with their hands, and we parse out what they mean.
Signal Your Intentions
The About.com Italian Language guide to Italian hand gestures has some of the more common gestures that are recognized in the country. Be aware that, like dialects, certain hand signals can mean different things within different regions—and can have completely different interpretations in other cultures. Practice these gestures on your Italian friends first to be sure you've got the right movement, otherwise a potentially embarrassing situation could develop.
