It might seem frivolous to carry out scientific research on a word like 'Huh?' may almost seem primitive in its simplicity, a word with this function is not found in our closest evolutionary cousins. Dingemanse and colleagues studied languages from around the world and found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English 'Huh?' The languages studied were Cha'palaa, Dutch, Icelandic, Italian, Lao, Mandarin Chinese, Murriny Patha, Russian, Siwu and Spanish. (To an English speaker, this tone would sound like a statement of fact: "Huh.") is not like those human sounds that happen to be universal because they are innate, such as sneezing or crying. Across all 10 languages, there were at least 64 simple consonants to choose from, but the word always started with an H or a glottal stop — the sound in the middle of the English "uh-oh." is much more similar across languages than words normally should be, it does differ across languages in systematic ways. in every language they studied — and they sound remarkably similar. The basic principle is well-known from biology: similar environmental constraints have led to the independent evolution of similar body plans in sharks and dolphins, and in the placental mammals of North-America and the marsupials of Australia. This is why words can change over time, and why we expect even words with similar functions to have different forms in unrelated languages. In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.
– Listen in on any language anywhere in the world and you're bound to hear a familiar sound: "Huh?" Dutch researchers who studied 10 languages on five continents say the one-syllable utterance might be that rarest of things: a universal word. And it's no mere tic or meaningless grunt, they say in their PLOS One study: It serves the vital purpose of allowing one person to let another know quickly that he doesn't understand something. It's "the glue that holds a broken conversation together," explains the Los Angeles Times. "You can't have a conversation without the ability to make repairs," says a Stanford expert not involved with the study but intrigued by it. "It is a universal need, no matter what kind of conversation you have." The researchers found the word in widely different languages ranging from Icelandic to Mandarin Chinese to West African Siwu, reports the New York Times. And though it may sound a bit different in some tongues—more like "ah" or "eh"—it remains fundamentally the same. They chalk it up to "convergent evolution," notes Science Codex, a term from biology. It's used to explain how different species, such as dolphins and sharks, evolve in similar ways because they live in similar environments. It seems that "huh?" is the linguistic version, a tool so useful to humans everywhere that they can't live without it. (In other language news, researchers suggest that being bilingual helps ward off dementia.)