I am Italian as well and love the joke, but it always makes it sound like any other culture doesn’t use their hands to convey meaning, which is obviously false. I do not notice a large difference between a northern Italian like me and any other American speaker, for instance.
Of course there will be a noticeable increase in gesticulation in an angry southern Italian person compared to a mild-mannered Englishman droning about philosophy.
Perhaps the difference lies not in the amount of gesturing, but in the heightened emotions of us southern Europeans.
> Of course there will be a noticeable increase in gesticulation in an angry southern Italian person compared to a mild-mannered Englishman droning about philosophy.
> Perhaps the difference lies not in the amount of gesturing, but in the heightened emotions of us southern Europeans.
As someone that has familial ties to both England and Sicily, although people on average are more overtly expressive in Southern Europe, the English are certainly not a monolith. For every "mild-mannered Englishman" there's also an equal amount of very "expressive" people, for example the meme of English tourists being absolute menaces in Southern Europe (especially Spain) does not come from the "mild-mannered" crowd, and I'm sure there are people who put up with these tourists that wish they were less expressive than the locals.
Britons vacationing in Greece have to be among the least mild mannered people on earth.
Of course, it's the "hooligan effect", where the 2% paints a bad picture of the whole.
I mostly agree with you, even though "2%" is a large understatement.
England is a very culturally diverse place, anyone that thinks that there's a great sense of social uniformity hasn't understood it that well.