Thanks for your interest! Have a read of the original paper or the FAQ, and be sure to check out our major follow-up study on communicative repair for context.



A word like ‘Huh?’ —used when one has not caught what someone just said—appears to be universal: it is found to have very similar form and function in languages across the globe. This is one of the findings of a major cross-linguistic study by researchers Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Dingemanse, Mark, Francisco Torreira, and N.J. Enfield. 2013. “Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items.” PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078273.

a quick overview of our key findings and methods an FAQ covering some misinterpretations we encountered a selection of the media coverage our work has generated

Key findings

If you want to know more about the study, we recommend reading the paper itself. Here we provide the following:

Huh? is not trivial. It might seem frivolous or even trivial to carry out scientific research on a word like Huh? But in fact this little word, along with others that function in similar ways (e.g., ‘Sorry?’ ‘What?’) is an indispensible tool in human communication. Without such words we would be unable to signal when we have problems with hearing or understanding what was said. Because conversation moves along so quickly, if we did not have reliable ways of signaling trouble, we would constantly fail to stay ‘on the same page’ in social interaction. While Huh? may seem an unlikely topic of scientific research, in fact human communication, and thus common understanding in social life, relies heavily on the use of such linguistic devices.

Huh? is universal. We sampled 31 languages from diverse language families around the world in this study, and we found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English Huh? This is an exception to the normal situation, namely that when words in different languages mean the same thing, they will usually sound completely different: compare, for example, these very different-sounding words for ‘dog’: inu in Japanese, chien in French, dog in English. Why do these differences between the sounds of words across languages occur? Because language does not impose any necessary connection between sound and meaning in words (a principle that linguists call ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’). This study shows that ‘Huh?’ is a rare exception to this otherwise strong rule.

Huh? is a word. An objection to our first finding might be that ‘Huh?’ is not a word after all. But our study finds that it is. Although the expression ‘Huh?’ is much more similar across languages than words normally should be, when we zoomed in and looked at the finer details, we discovered that this expression does differ across languages in subtle but systematic ways. These differences give us evidence that ‘Huh?’ is integrated into each linguistic system, thus supporting the view that it is, in fact, a word. Here are some of the subtle differences: In Spanish it’s e. In Dutch it often starts with /h/, as in hè. In Cha’palaa (an indigenous language of Ecuador) it often starts with a glottal stop, as in ʔa, and it has falling intonation, in line with the fact that questions in this language often have falling intonation. Therefore: Huh? is not like those human sounds that happen to be universal because they are innate, such as sneezing or crying. It is a word that has to be learned in subtly different forms in each language.

Huh? is not innate. ‘Huh?’ may seem almost primitive in its simplicity, but we don’t find vocalizations with this function in our closest evolutionary cousins. It’s not an involuntary response like a sneeze or a cry of pain. Indeed, to have such a word, specialized for clarifying matters of understanding, only makes sense when a fully functioning cooperative system of communication (i.e., human language) is already in place — babies don’t use it, infants don’t use it perfectly, but children from about 5 have mastered it perfectly, along with the main structures of their grammar. If there is a plausible explanation that doesn’t assume it’s innate, we prefer that, on the standard scientific principle that it is best to keep to the simplest possible assumptions and explanations. In our paper we provide such an explanation: convergent cultural evolution.

Huh? is likely shaped by convergent evolution. In conversation, we are under pressure to respond appropriately and timely to what was just said; when we are somehow unable to do this—for example, when we didn’t quite catch what the other person just said—we need an escape hatch. This particular context places constraints on, and functional motivations for, the form of the word. The signal has to be something maximally simple and quick to produce in situations when we’re literally at a loss to say something; and it has to be a questioning word to signal that the first speaker must now speak again. In language after language, we find a word like ‘Huh?’ that fits the bill perfectly: it is a simple, minimal, quick-to-produce questioning syllable. We propose this is a form of convergent evolution in language. Convergent evolution is a phenomenon well-known from evolutionary biology. When different species live in similar conditions, they can independently evolve similar traits. In a similar way, the similarity of huh? across a set of widely divergent languages may be due to the fact that the constraints from its environment are the same everywhere.

What did we do?

Preliminaries

Our starting point was a finding we reported in another study (Enfield, Dingemanse et 16 al. 2013): that many spoken languages provide two basic ways of signalling communicative trouble: an interjection like ‘huh?’ and a question word like ‘what?’. While the question word differed across unrelated languages, the interjection looked suspiciously similar, something we flagged for further investigation. The present study is a careful comparative investigation of 196 tokens of this interjection in ten languages.

To make sure that the similarities we saw were not just due to our particular selection of ten languages, we located examples of the interjection in as many additional languages as we could find. There were 31 spoken languages for which we either had recordings or published transcripts of sequences of other-initiated repair (the technical term for the context in which we find the interjection, explained below). These languages are shown on the map below.

In all of the languages, we found that ‘huh?’ showed the same tight fit of form and function. Everywhere this word appears to be a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant if any, and questioning intonation. This made us confident that our preliminary observations warranted a careful comparative phonetic analysis.

Our research question was: Is “Huh?” a universal word? And what is the explanation for its striking similarity across ten languages from five continents?

Data collection

We examined 196 instances of huh? extracted from recordings of informal conversation in 10 languages around the world: Siwu (a minority language spoken in Ghana), Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Cha’palaa (a minority language spoken in Ecuador), Icelandic, Lao (spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia), Dutch, and Murriny Patha (an Australian Aboriginal language). These are languages 1-10 on the map above.

In all of the languages, we restricted our focus to cases that occurred in exactly the same context in conversation. The technical term for this context is “other-initiated repair”: a sequence in which one person says something, the other then ‘initiates repair’ by saying Huh?, and the first provides a ‘repair solution’, usually by repeating the thing they said before (though often with slight revisions).

Phonetic analysis

We studied these audio recordings in two ways. First, we did an auditory phonetic analysis in which three linguistically-trained analysts independently scored every one of the 196 recordings on five phonetic dimensions. The instances were presented in random order and no information was provided about the language. One set of findings presented in the paper was derived from the combined results of this auditory phonetic coding.

Second, we did an instrumental phonetic analysis of a subset of the data in order to verify the quality of the auditory analysis. For this we focused in on two of the languages—Spanish and Chapalaa (an indigenous minority language spoken in Ecuador)—and we compared readings of pitch, and of the first and second ‘vowel formants’ of each example (these provide an objective measure of the differences in sound between vowels such as ‘a’ versus ‘i’ versus ‘u’).

What did we NOT do?

We did NOT study huh? in dictionaries. Many dictionaries don’t list it as a word and even if they do we can’t be sure of its precise form or function. Instead, we only use recordings of actual conversations.

We did NOT look at uses of huh? in contexts other than ‘other-initiated repair’. We know that huh?-like words are also used in other contexts (e.g. to pursue a response, or as a tag question at the end of an utterance). We suspect that these uses are related to the function we studied, but that would be a matter for another study.

We did NOT compare written-down versions of huh? across languages, nor did we rely on second-hand reports about the languages we studied. We worked with almost 200 audio recordings of huh? in real conversations (averaging about 20 per language), and we compared those auditorily and instrumentally. This was to make sure that our analysis was based on directly observed facts about what happens in real, everyday language use.

We did NOT study only huh?. This research is part of a larger investigation of language and social interaction in the ERC-funded project “Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use” led by Enfield. ‘Huh?’ belongs to a larger set of expressions used to signal and solve communicative mishaps — an extremely important function of human language. Most of these expressions vary quite widely across languages. Only ‘Huh?’, which is the most common generic signal of trouble we found, happens to be strongly similar everywhere, and that is one of the findings we report in this paper. If you are interested in the larger system (and the place of huh? within it), we can recommend other comparative studies we published:

Dingemanse, Mark, Joe Blythe, and Tyko Dirksmeyer. 2014. “Formats for Other-Initiation of Repair across Languages: An Exercise in Pragmatic Typology.” Studies in Language 38 (1): 5–43. doi:10.1075/sl.38.1.01din (download pdf).

Dingemanse, Mark, Seán G. Roberts, Julija Baranova, Joe Blythe, Paul Drew, Simeon Floyd, Rosa S. Gisladottir, Kobin Kendrick, Stephen C. Levinson, Elizabeth Manrique, Giovanni Rossi, and N.J. Enfield. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.” PLOS ONE 10 (9): e0136100. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0136100.

Languages and contributors

This study uses data from 10 languages, collected in a larger comparative research project on how communicative mishaps are solved. Below is a list of the languages we studied along with the colleagues who made recordings from their corpora available for analysis.

Language Field site Researcher Cha’palaa Ecuador Simeon Floyd Dutch The Netherlands Mark Dingemanse Icelandic Iceland Rósa Gísladóttir Italian Italy Giovanni Rossi Lao Laos Nick Enfield Mandarin Chn. Taiwan Kobin Kendrick Murrinh-Patha Northern Australia Joe Blythe Russian Russia Julija Baranova Siwu Ghana Mark Dingemanse Spanish Spain Francisco Torreira

Want to know more?

Check out the paper or the supplementary materials. The authors of this study are Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield.