The same gesture can mean different things, or have different names in different languages. In this Lingthusiasm zine, Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about these "emblem gestures."
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Why do we gesture when we talk? (Lingthusiasm podcast)
Why do we move our hands when we talk? (Tom Scott's Language Files on YouTube)
Gesture: A Slim Guide (book by Lauren Gawne, 2025, on Amazon or Bookshop)
Gestures (book by Morris et al, 1979, borrowable on archive.org)
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Using hand gestures might feel like an intuitive way to communicate across language barriers, but their meaning can change, and there are few universal signs that everyone agrees on.
A lovely longform article from William Park at the BBC, on gesture and meaning and time. It features quotes from some gesture researchers I admire, and I’m also in there talking about one of my areas of research overlap at the moment, emoji and gesture. From the piece:
No hand gesture is ever read in isolation, with the exception of one kind: emoji.
The Internet has opened up this explosion of informal written communication and there's been this gap in what we can express in informal writing – Lauren Gawne
If you have ever struggled to express sarcasm in text you might have resorted to using emoji to help you out. Gawne says that our written language is distinctly lacking in ways to express sentiments like sarcasm because informal writing is a relatively new idea. For millennia, she says, informality was restricted to speech.
"The Internet has opened up this explosion of informal written communication and there's been this gap in what we can express in informal writing," she says, "An emoji is one of the resources people have taken to fill that gap."
This gesture has various meanings in different cultures, but the wider context can give us clues to deciphering it (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont/BBC)
Gawne has worked with linguist Gretchen McCulloch and Jennifer Daniel from Unicode to include a greater diversity of hand gestures in the official Unicode dictionary of emoji. What excites Gawne about encoding hand gestures in the Unicode dictionary is that they are so versatile. The fact that (like real hand gestures) their meanings can change is useful, she says. An image of a starfish is a starfish to everyone, but a hand shape can have whatever meaning the users want to ascribe to it.
Read the full piece: The hand gestures that last longer than spoken languages
