[ardit33]

1. We are born with the ability to gesture, and not something that is learned directly. So it is a in-born trait. You get the ability of speech, and gesturing tags along. (but most likely, evolutionary speaking, gesturing came first).

2. Gesturing is linked to speech/language. Different languages will have different gestures, not because they learned them, but by the grammatical structure/intonation of the language.

It will have been interesting to see multi-lingual people, and see if the level of gesturing changes when they switch language.

"The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers."

[NoodleIncident]

I wonder what it is about Italian that leads to the stereotype, then?

[082349872349872]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chironomia ?

It's likely the gestures have as heavy an accent as the speech in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSTAAs1Y-38

(:futurama fry:) Not sure if codified gesture, or ancient meme format.

[edmundsauto]

Could be frequency, could be magnitude of the gestures, could be the gestures are more prominent/memorable/not subtle. Probably a combo, or, it's possible that the stereotype was centered around a few prominent individuals and is not actually a trait of that languages speakers.

[ardit33]

It is not just Italians, but latin based languages (Spanish, French) are also known to use more gestures, while Germanic ones, a lot less... eg. German, Swedish folks almost come out as 'robotic' compared to Mediterranean countries.

[irrational]

I speak English and Spanish and I have almost no hand gestures. But I see other English speakers that are mono-lingual and they have extensive hand gestures. I wonder what is up with that?

[nomoreservices]

I'm a Brazilian and I gesture a lot. People here in the US find it funny.

[QuesnayJr]

I was just participating in a conference over Zoom. For most people it was enough to just listen to the audio and look at the slides on their shared screen. For the one Italian speaker, you really needed to watch her hand gestures as well to get the full effect of the talk.