Are questions about learning or practicing nonverbal communication or body language on-topic?

Question

Books on leadership will often assert that anywhere from 2/3 to 80% of communication is nonverbal - that is, expressed in tone of voice, posture, eye contact, and gestures rather than the specific vocabulary, conjugations, or grammatical structures used. Are questions about learning or practicing such nonverbal communication on-topic?

To be clear, I'm not talking about signed or manual languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) that are not spoken but have specific grammar and vocabulary, but about so-called "soft skills" in communication. For example, see this article from The Balance Careers.

Obviously, we already have a close reason for "grammatical rules or specific characteristics of a language", so questions like "Please interpret the posture of the person in this video" or "For how many seconds should I make eye contact in order to convey sincerity?" are likely already inherently off-topic, but I could see someone asking questions like "How do I find a partner to practice eye contact with?", "How do I assess my level of ability in reading someone's attitude to the topic of discussion from their posture?", or "Is there a certification in using body language effectively?".

Answer 1

As you mentioned, body language is part of communication and some of it is specific to a few specific cultures, and hence languages (separating language and culture as two fully independent topics never works in my experience). I'm learning Korean at the moment and they have quite a few very ostentatious body signs that you need to learn if you want to be very proficient (C2 level) in in-person conversations that make it quite evident to me that learning body signals is part of learning a language.

However, most people will not think of body signals first when they think of learning a language, which I suppose will lead to very few questions on body language. If they're not very numerous, I doubt they would be a cause for concern, so why ban them?

I also think the guidelines you mentioned for appropriate questions about body language are fair and in keeping with the "What topics can I ask about here?" guidelines.