A new study found that the word “huh?” is something that everybody understands across the globe. It serves the same purpose and meaning even when spoken in different languages.
Mark Dingemanse, lead author of the study from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and his colleagues investigated the word and found that it is naturally spoken in ten languages and provided evidence that “huh?” is a universal word and not a mere coincidence.
The researchers examined 196 recordings in ten languages across the globe. They noticed that the word is used was spoken to have serve the same purpose and meaning. However, they noted that there are slight variations on how the word was pronounced, such as “E?” in Spanish, “A?” in Mandarin, and “He?” in Dutch.
Their analysis draw two conclusions: first, “Huh?” is universal, and second, “Huh?” is a word. The first conclusion as explained by the researchers, “the similarities in form and function of an interjection with the specific function of repair initiation are very much greater across languages than chance coincidence would admit.” The second conclusion that it is a word is that it is linguistic in nature as it is able to fit in to any language. “Huh? may be a non-prototypical word, but it is a word.”
So how did “Huh?” become similar to all languages? The researchers noticed that the word is used to indicate problems of hearing and understanding during conversations. They studied the conversational structure in unrelated languages and compilation of published literature in 31 languages. They examined how “Huh?” was used in informal conversations in 10 languages in terms of phonology, word structure, and grammar.
The researchers believe that their study has established a link between language use and its possible effect on language structure.
The study was published in the online journal PLOS One.
