Speak Italian, The Art of the Gesture
Speak Italian, The Art of the Gesture
Do you know what most amuses me about foreigners in Italy? How they try to socialise with the locals trying to communicate by copying the Italian hand sign language – the second official Italian language.
Sometimes I feel embarrassed for them. They generally pick up the wrong gestures or the wrong meaning and get frustrated because they are misunderstood.
One of them is my girlfriend – a born Kiwi. Every day she comes home from work with a new hand sign gesture which she has pick up form her Italian collegues. Most of them have vulgar meaning and are generally the way Italian workers express their frustration against their bosses.
But more ridiculous of a foreigner trying to imitate and Italian gestures are the Italian wondering why Germans and English don’t understand them. More than once I have seen my parents trying to communicate with my girlfriend’s New Zealand parents and thinking how stupid they should be if they can not even understand hand signs – one of the first thing an Italian child is thought to learn by the whole family.
We learn the gesture language long before learning our language and months before learning how to speak. When an Italian kid can say mum or dad, he or she has learned already a whole “alphabet” of hand signs to communicate his feeling or simple essential messages to parents and relatives. A real way of communicating which the babies found natural and that the Italians have developed in real gestures with specific meanings.
And the systems works so well that we keep using our hands to communicate.
Every culture has its ways to communicate non-verbally. But the Italian gestures, together with mafia and pasta, have a main role in the Italian stereotype. Like if all the Italians eat pasta (which is true) or all the Italian are Mafiosi (false) but all the Italians know how to gesture:”Ma che vuoi? Ho sete, ho fame” or ” you are talking nonsense”.
If you’re looking to get beat up in Italy, just hold up a fist to a male passerby with your index and pinky fingers extended. In Italiano, it means that someone is intimately involved with the man’s wife or girlfriend – most often, by inference, you. This is called “giving someone the horns” and will certainly get you pummelled mercilessly, especially if a third party noticed the gesture. It works especially well if said wife or girlfriend is present.
But try it to avoid showing your fingers from your car windows, because according to the Italian Hight Court is a personal threaten and you can be fine symbolically 50euros – but if admitted that you didn’t really mean it, the fine can go done to 20 euros.