Is a 7 in English the same as a 7 in Spanish?
I consider myself to be something of a cultural chameleon. I spent my childhood and teenage years bouncing between schools across the world as I followed my dad in his job at a large multinational. It’s a challenge especially for a teenager because you’re juggling between a desire to fit in and a desire to be unique, but that balance tilts heavily towards the latter when you don’t know the local language or culture or even the sports they play. It forced me to learn the idiosyncrasies of each culture and language. Now, as an adult, I’ve sort of carried on with this vaguely nomadic lifestyle, having lived and worked in two countries. The result of all of this moving and blending in is that when I meet someone new they struggle to guess where I’m from or what my mother tongue is, while I can usually quickly tell where they are from just from briefly listening to them speak.
That upbringing contributed to a love for languages which led me to do a part of my degree in linguistics at university. There I especially enjoyed my courses in phonetics because understanding phonetics helped me perfect my accent in foreign languages. I like the challenge of blending in and nailing the accent as much as possible, as that is by far the easiest giveaway that someone is not a native speaker. For example, I think I got my English accent to the point where very few people can tell that it is my second language. I learned to not say the ‘l’ in ‘salmon.’ I got that flat American ‘a’ in ‘pasta’ instead of the elongated version I grew up with. I learned to stress RE-gis-ter instead of re-GIS-ter. It all makes for a vaguely neutral North American accent, but it’s convincing enough.
I thought I had all my bases covered, until a low-budget TV show that I was lazily watching a few months ago revealed a blind spot in my masterplan: my writing.
Specifically, my handwriting.
The show is from Argentina, and it follows two Buenos Aires detectives solving crimes. In one of the episodes, they investigate the murder of a famous television producer and they’re pursuing every lead. One of these was a note found at the scene of the crime with some names and numbers written on it. One of the detectives takes a look and remarks that it might have been written by a foreigner, possibly an English speaker, because the 7s were not crossed.
Huh.
I cross my 7s, but I assumed this was out of personal preference rather than some cultural influence. The detective’s theory suggested that doing so could identify me as a non-native English speaker. I was skeptical, but at the same time there was something to it—if you saw a handwriting sample, you could probably guess the gender, age, and handedness of the author, so why not their nationality or mother tongue? If it was true, have I been leaving linguistic fingerprints on every piece of paper I’d ever touched?
It was time for some detective work of my own and, luckily, I happened to have the perfect firsthand evidence to do so: a whole shoebox full of international handwriting samples. I am an avid fan of snail mail and I have a large collection of postcards from people all over the world—friends and strangers alike—that I’ve collected over the years. It’s perfect—except I’ve never lived anywhere with a 7 in the address and the number 7 rarely appears in the context of a postcard.
I couldn’t test the detective’s theory.
Down the rabbit hole
If I couldn’t test the theory with my postcards, I’d have to do some research.
It turns out that where and how you learned to write as a child leaves a permanent fingerprint on your handwriting—like having an accent. Every country has distinct scripts that are provided by governments or by textbook publishers to their schools. These systems get deeply ingrained during those crucial formative years when children are learning letter formation, stroke direction, and connection patterns. Once learned, these foundational patterns stick for life, even as individual style develops.
Even more interesting, people whose native language uses a different writing system than the Latin alphabet (like Chinese or Hindi) bring those patterns into their English handwriting—Chinese writers favor straighter lines while Indian writers tend toward more flowing, cursive styles.
For those who use the Latin alphabet natively, there are many differences. In some European countries, like Germany, they add a hook at the bottom of the number 9 and the number 4 is written with a triangular top instead of an open top. In Spain, Latin America, and other Mediterranean countries, people cross the lowercase q, whereas Anglophone countries sometimes draw a hook toward the right at the bottom. In France, they extend the vertical part of the lowercase p past the top. They also put a space before exclamation marks and question marks.
Further in my investigation, I learned that in many European countries children learn to cross their 7s to distinguish them from 1s because 1s are written with a hook toward the left at the top (a serif), which can be long or short depending on the country. If we were to work backwards, if I could see how someone writes a 1, I could predict whether they’d cross their 7s!
Luckily for me, a few of my addresses have included a 1 in them. I could now use my postcards to test the detective’s theory for myself.
Following the breadcrumbs
I went through all of the postcards with a 1 on them and sorted them by their origin: Anglophone countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US) and non-Anglophone countries (mostly in continental Europe, a few in Latin America). The results were telling:
- Anglophone correspondents (14 total): None drew a serif on the 1
- Non-Anglophone correspondents (11 total): Six drew a serif on the 1
From this quick (and most definitely unscientific) experiment, we can conclude that Anglophones do not cross their 7s. But we also can’t conclude that doing so instantly means that the writer is not an Anglophone. It does mean however that the detective was not wrong in suggesting this possibility—it wasn’t just a pseudointellectual plot device on the part of the show’s writers.
The detectives do go on to crack the case and it turned out that the perpetrator was indeed a foreigner. The detective’s linguistic intuition proved remarkably accurate.
So the question remains: should I retrain my hand? Should I write my 1s and 7s unadorned as the Anglophones do, completing my transformation into the perfect cultural chameleon? I don’t think so. I find there is something honest in these small betrayals of ink and pen. Let them remain as they are: a quiet testimony to the countries that shaped me, visible only to those who know where to look.
Postscript: Field Notes
This little investigation sent me off into a research tangent on the history and the current (regrettable) state of handwriting.
Historical Development
I came across the University of Potsdam’s ARETE project, ‘Visual History of the Latin Alphabet.’ It’s a fascinating resource that walks you through the history of the Latin alphabet, everything from archaic Latin and Roman cursive to medieval Gothic and modern handwriting scripts. It’s great for understanding the rich history behind the letters we use.1
I learned that with regard to schooling and how regional differences develop, the 19th and 20th centuries in particular is where things start to take shape. This period saw many Western countries implement universal primary school education. Among other subjects, children would learn to read and write. Governments therefore needed to develop standardized handwriting systems that would be taught in their schools. These were developed by designers with their own approaches to the alphabet.
I found these two publications that compiled children’s textbooks from across the world:
- Florian Hardwig’s detailed study on international school scripts, reviewed in the article ‘Vierdimensionale Urschrift’ by Jutta Nachtwey.2
- ‘Cadernos de Tipografia e Design, Nr. 14’ by Paulo Heitlinger delves into school calligraphy in various countries from a typography perspective.3
Modern Decline
I also learned about the state of handwriting in the 21st century. With globalization and digitalization, we see more homogeneity in handwriting. In part, this is due to schools giving less importance to handwriting, favoring instead typing on computers. There are countries where children are not taught how to write in cursive anymore, which is where most of the regional variations exist. Finally, and most importantly, research suggests that children copy the way their smartphones and tablets display characters when writing them by hand.
The Case for Handwriting
There are arguments to be made in favor of writing by hand. There are studies that demonstrate it has numerous benefits. One study compared two groups of students attending a lecture: those who took notes by hand and those who did so on a computer. They discovered that those who took notes on a computer wrote much more and did so much faster, but oftentimes they were just copying the professor’s notes or what they heard verbatim. For those who took notes by hand, they wrote less, but they were forced to process and understand the content to be able to write it down in a summarized form on paper. The groups were then made to take a test with questions related to the lecture, and it turned out that those who wrote by hand obtained higher scores than those who took notes on a computer.4
Future Outlook
The governments of some countries are starting to realize the benefits of handwriting and are rethinking their school curricula.5 For example, schools in Sweden are looking to give handwriting more focus and to reduce the number of screens in schools while making printed books more readily available. In England, children need to learn to write in cursive before turning eight. Even in the USA, there are some schools that have reached the point of entirely banning computers. Is this enough to recover the pronounced regional variations that used to exist in handwriting? I don’t think so. The trend toward homogeneity is too strong, and I doubt that going to the extreme of banning screens in schools is the right thing to do—it’s important to learn to use the right tool for the job.
As a side note, it turns out that handwriting analysis is a perfect match for machine learning. There have been a number of studies done that show that machine learning is great at identifying gender, handedness, age, and even national origin.678