4. Making gender friendliness

Making the medium of communication gender friendly is a crucial issue in the modern world (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003). Here the term ‘medium’ indicates the forms of communication like verbal codes or nonverbal activities which accomplish the process of a communicative event. As far as the verbal expression of communication is concerned, the obvious characters are firmly male-motivated. Nowadays theorists of feminism all over the world identify that most of the human languages is gender biased (Khan 2010; Bucholtz 2002). This is because, various linguistic components such as lexicon, grammatical constituents of many modern practicing languages including English are undoubtedly male-dominating.   Sometimes various forms of nonverbal communication can provide new light in such a prevalent reality mentioned above. The data of the present research help to depict that most of the BEE hand gestures are truly gender friendly, although a few of them get their identity either as a male or a female gesture. For example, the BEE hand gesture the palm covering mouth (see the Figure 4a) indicating showing being aspect is a female-dominating one, as it is mainly performed by the Bengali female. Although both male and female members in this community regularly get upset due to facing some unavoidable family as well as social problems, women exclusively perform this gesture in this community.

In addition, some BEE hand gestures specifying the meaning of romance and love expressions like the finger kissing or the finger ILY-sign are mostly performed by female members. On the other hand, the BEE hand gesture thumb up (see the Figure 4b) indicating rudeness is identified as truly male dominating in this community. In fact, as a native communicative sign the extended thumb of this hand gesture gets a metaphoric shape of man’s organs. Hence due to the existing social taboo female persons usually do not perform this thumb up gesture. Except these 4 communicative signs mentioned above, all other BEE hand gestures are exclusively gender friendly because these are commonly performed by both male and female in the Bengali community.