This post is part of our special coverage Languages and the Internet

We as humans have a unique ability to communicate via spoken languages. However, in a crowded and loud city like Cairo, we sometimes need more than a spoken language to communicate.

Crowded streets of Cairo – Photo take from mileusna Flickr account under Creative Commons license

Lyndall EL Masry, an expatriate living in Cairo, noticed that people who use shared taxi micro-buses use certain hand signals to communicate the locations they want to go to:

I find the micro and local buses a bit daunting sometimes – the loud and fast Arabic – the hand signals that have a meaning for a particular destinations.

Those hand signals make it easier to communicate between the drivers and those who are waiting for the micro-bus from a far distance in noisy streets. Ashraf Hamdy – an Egyptian caricaturist – tried to document those hand signals and their meanings in his blog. Here is an image to explain the various hand signals:

In fact, the use of sign language is common in hearing communities wherever speech is not practical or permitted, such as among scuba divers, or footballers, and in television recording studios and stock exchange markets. It's also clear for those who speak Arabic that the above hand signals used in Egyptian streets are more like a mime compared to the linguistics of more complex sign languages, whereas signs have a visual relationship to what they refer to.

The use of car horns

Another form of communication – but it's an audible one this time – is the use of car horns. Dr_ElSioufy wrote a post [ar] in an online forum about those forms of communication. He said:

He then continued to describe each part of the car and its own vocabulary.

I thought the use of car horns for communication is an Egyptian thing, until I read about the students in UC San Diego’s Cognitive Science Department who wrote about the presence of the same phenomenon in India too on their blog, where they wonder whether there are any studies about this.

In my recent trip to India I noticed extremely liberal use of the car horn from my own driver and everyone else on the road. Unlike in the United States, the horn was not used in anger or frustration but as a form of communication. There might be a good opportunity to study the linguistics of this single sound communication. Any thoughts on what kind of study should be done? What else could a study of car horn use inform about human cognition? Let us know in the comments!

Gary Runn also compared the culture of horn honking in the United States, Italy and India. The Jamaicans too have their own car horn honking language with its own set of vocabulary. Such form of communication can be linked to smoke signals and drums used by our ancestors thousands of years ago. And since we use car horns for communication, isn't it possible that they should reflect their owners’ personality too? BBC published an article about research claiming that car horns sound is another big factor in car buyers decision.

Prof Van Leeuwen, an expert in the semiotics of sound at the university's Centre for Language and Communication, said manufacturers were paying more attention to the sound of the horn, which can be a deciding factor for potential car buyers. He argued that more car companies were matching the sound of the horn to the “personality” of the car.

Finally, isn't it interesting that no matter how advanced the means of communications we have nowadays are, we sometimes revert to ancient forms of communication? The following SMS sent between lovers [ar] summarizes the fact that even when having a mobile phone in our hands we might sometimes choose to use it the ancient way for economical reasons.

This post is part of our special coverage Languages and the Internet