While the verbal structure of languages may differ between cultures and countries, when it comes to non-verbal communication, with hand gestures or facial expressions, it seems we all speak the same language.

If Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush’s, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe. English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, “mice eat cheese”. Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or “mice cheese eat”.

This is something world travelers, who may know very little of the language of the country they are visiting, could probably tell you. I found non-verbal communication very effective on many occasions when I was roaming the world :)