Gestures of the World

At work an idea is brewing to collect and publish the Gestures of the World.
PW started it, some foreign students joined in and so did I.
There have of course been previous attempts, like ‘The NONVERBAL DICTIONARY of GESTURES, SIGNS & BODY LANGUAGE CUES‘ which is a lovely site made with a lot of care.

Example: The Lip Pout is described as a fairly universal sign of sulkiness
Other collections: www.lichaamstaal.nl – www.gesture.com

And then there was this half-baked idea to make a historical gesture classification.

Heather Brookes created ‘A Repertoire of South African Quotable Gestures‘ with quite interesting items, I must say. See If you can guess what this one means:

Gestures : The Do’s and Taboos of Body Language Around the World by Roger E. Axtell who wrote quite a bit on cross-cultural interaction.

Field Guide to Gestures: How to Identify and Interpret Virtually Every Gesture Known to Man

If you want a careful analysis, nothing beats Adam Kendon’s 2004 book ‘Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance‘

Morris, D., Collett, P., Marsh, P., & O’Shaughnessy, M. (1979). Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution. London: Jonathan Cape

Other collections: Wikipedia – Adam Kendon’s Bibliography –

Online Sign Language Dictionaries: List – NGT – ASL (alt more) – VGT – DGS (wiki) – Indian – LSF

HandSpeak covers ASL, BabySign, other gestures, facial expressions and cultural and artistic aspects. Sadly, it is a commercial site that charges for access. It does show samples like Kumari in Nepalese Sign Language or some of the ASL Lessons like Indexing.

Funnies:
Aeronautics Sign Language Dictionary
Avatar Animations?
Duiken