THE IMPORTANCE OF HAND GESTURES ACROSS DIFFERENT CULTURES 1. Introduction As we all know, body language can convey a wide range of meanings, h ence it is significant to learn the body language of different cultures because what always happens is that we might be fluent in many foreign languages, but we do not understand a body language specific for a particular country and it might get us into a trouble. Part of the reason is that verbal language by itself only communicates a certain amount of content , however, nonverbal communication is associated with language as well, and since people always learn and develop their language skills without nonverbal behaviors, they often have serious problems when being abroad and talking to strangers. For these reasons, people from every culture, including various country leaders and several U.S. presidents, have been guilty of unintentionally offending people from different cultures because of the use of inappropriate gestures. Since a lot of what is being communicated is non-verbal, it can lead to many intercultural conflict s , misunderstandings and ambiguities in communication, despite language fluency. Therefore this paper aims at presenting and exploring cultural differences in hand gestures in order to indicate the importance of this body movement because even a single hand gesture can cause serious problems. 2. Hand gestures and their meanings It is essential to know that when learning a particular language means not only learning the pronunciation or the grammar, but also the culture and customs. Language is not the only way how to express our ideas or feelings. Body movements, specifically hand gestures can also convey messages and learning the common rules of body language in different cultures is very useful for us to understand each other better. Likewise Lefevre (2011) indicates that it is important to know the local body language because the uninformed can easily commit terrible blunders without even knowing what they have done because every culture is different, and what is considered polite in one environment can be deeply offensive in another (p. 9). Below