In Bulgaria, shaking your head means yes

You ask a waiter in Sofia whether you can still order the dish of the day. He turns his head from side to side with a half smile, and you start looking at the menu again. No need: he said yes. In Bulgaria, turning the head side to side means yes, and moving it up and down means no.

The US government’s commercial service flags this in its guide for business travelers to the country. It also gives the advice that solves every case: when in doubt, ask for a spoken answer.

A misunderstanding 150 years old

The confusion isn’t new. The linguist Roman Jakobson, in a 1972 study of yes and no gestures, recounts how Russian soldiers who served in Bulgaria during the war with Turkey in 1877 and 1878 never forgot the clash between their head gestures and those of the Bulgarians. The reversed signals, he wrote, threw conversations off track and occasionally led to annoying misunderstandings.

The system most English speakers know, nodding down for yes, is shared by the vast majority of European peoples, including Germanic peoples, the French, most Romance-speaking peoples, and East and West Slavs such as Russians and Poles. The Bulgarian system has parallels among a few groups in the Balkans and the Near East.

It’s not just the same gesture swapped

Jakobson showed that the Bulgarian “no” isn’t quite our nod for yes. Our yes starts with the head moving forward and down, like a bow, and coming back. The Bulgarian no starts with the head thrown back, away from the other person, before returning to its normal position. When the gesture is repeated several times, the difference blurs, and to an outsider the two look almost identical.

That, according to Jakobson, is why our system needed a “no” that looked nothing like its “yes.” The natural opposite of a bow would be throwing the head back, but repeated over and over, that motion would blur into the nod itself. The solution was to turn the face sideways, away from the other person, a gesture of refusal that breaks face-to-face contact.

The Bulgarian “yes,” turning the head from side to side, has its own logic too, according to Jakobson. By turning the head, usually starting to the right, the speaker offers an ear to the other person, a sign of attention and goodwill toward what’s being said.

Rocking the head like a pendulum, tilting it from one side to the other, is something else: for Jakobson, it signals amazement, somewhere between yes and no.

What about the Ottoman legend?

There’s a more romantic explanation that gets told in Bulgaria. The country spent five centuries under Ottoman rule, and the legend goes that when the rulers tried to force Bulgarians to convert from Christianity to Islam, they began swapping their gestures: they nodded as if to accept, while inside they were saying no.

It’s a nice story, but it’s a legend, with no record to back it up. Jakobson looked for the explanation in the shape of the movements themselves.

If you’re visiting

• Don’t rely on the gesture alone. If you’re not sure what a head movement meant, ask for the answer out loud.
• Learn the two words in Bulgarian: “da” means yes and “ne” means no.
• In big cities, expect both systems. With English more widely spoken, many Bulgarians use Western-style gestures.
• Watch your own head, too. Your nod for yes may read as no, and the other way round.

Gestures feel universal until your first trip. In Switzerland, the mix-up is a different one: the rule everyone repeats about not flushing the toilet at night was never actually a law.

Sources

• Bulgaria – Business Travel, International Trade Administration, US government: the yes and no gestures and the advice to ask for a spoken answer.
• Nods, Language Log, University of Pennsylvania, 2018: excerpts from Roman Jakobson’s “Motor signs for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’” (Language in Society, 1972) on the Russian soldiers of 1877–78, head-gesture systems in Europe and the shape of the Bulgarian yes and no.
• Why Do Bulgarians Shake Their Heads To Say Yes?, Culture Trip, 2017: the Ottoman legend.