Huh? Universal?

[dampingwire]

Everybody in Almost Every Language Says “Huh”? HUH?!.

TL;DR: "Huh?" works in many languages. Well, so far "many" means 10, but they're confident the number will go higher ...

So is anyone here a native speaker of a language where there is no "Huh?"?

[zenmonkey]

hmmm! They studied 10 languages and came to this conclusion?

Whatever the interjection they chose for Spanish, it certainly isn't the same as an English "huh?".
There is an "eh?" in Spanish and a brief scan of the paper suggests this is what they chose as equivalent.

Which shows that "huh" isn't universal. It's just confirmation bias at work. Look for a universal there and you'll find it.

[Speakeasy]

Without doing any research on the matter at all, I suspect that “huh?” and its equivalents in many other languages likely evolved from a primeval “grunt” which, depending on its inflection (possibly rising, but not necessarily so) serves as an invitation to the listener to express his agreement with the “huher”, serves to invite further comment or explanation on the part of the listener, or serves to indicate the “huher’s” surprise, disbelief, amusement, scorn, or anger. Should the "huh" be emitted by a Silver Back, I suggest that you assume the worst case scenario.

Huh ???

Huh.jpg

[Beli Tsar]

Does 'huh?' even work in all forms of English? It isn't exactly usual in this part of Scotland...

[Speakeasy]

I have lived in almost every province of Canada and have mostly certainly traversed the country many, many times. I have heard several variants of “huh” … huh, uh, ay, ey, wha, and similar indistinct noises some of which would be best described as a simple “grunting” or “snorting.”

I would not be surprised to learn that our species’ initial attempts at verbal communications included a “grunt/snort” which has stuck with many languages even though there are now many vocalized/nasalized variants of it.

[Iversen]

I do recognize this kind of filler word from several languages. For instance in French the equivalent of "huh?" would be "hein?", but then I came to think of my own language, Danish, and I was stumped. We do use similar sounds, but not "huh?" in the same places as English. If we want to urge our interlocutor to confirm our statements, we add "ikk'?" (from "ikke", not). If the interlocutor wants to express slight scepticism it would be with something like "uhuh?" (rising pitch and a vowel quality closer to 'euheu'), which may be the ultimate source of the more deliberate "aha?", which has a variant "aha!" ('ahaaa',first with rising then deeper falling pitch), which we use in heureka moments. And then there is the ubiquitous word "øh" ('euh') which mostly is used to give us thinking pauses where we try to keep the interlocutor from saying anything by continuing to emit sounds, and then the pitch is level - but "øh" can also be used with rising pitch if we want to catch the attention of somebody. But "huh?" in the same places as English? I daresay not - and that makes me wonder what those researchers actually heard in those ten foreign languages. Did they just hear some sound beyond the dictionary and converted it into their own native "huh"?

[FernandoTercio]

This is interesting, would any of you give me some book recommendation about universal features of languages? I'm not talking about grammatical structures or thing like that, more like the sounds to refer to "mother" and "father", this "uh" affair and so on.

By the way, here in Spain we say "eh?"

[zjones]

This is interesting, would any of you give me some book recommendation about universal features of languages? I'm not talking about grammatical structures or thing like that, more like the sounds to refer to "mother" and "father", this "uh" affair and so on.

By the way, here in Spain we say "eh?"

You might be interested in reading information about universal features within specific families of languages -- the Indo-European languages, for example. It wouldn't technically be universal but it might be of interest to you since your intention is to speak at least three IE languages. I've listened to The History of English Podcast which is pretty in-depth but covers some SUPER fascinating aspects of linguistics, roots and IE language history that don't only pertain to English. (In fact one of my complaints is that this podcast is too in-depth and doesn't really focus on English as much as the title would imply.)

Then of course you might want to go on and read about the Semitic and Sino-Tibetan (?) language families.

As far as this "huh" thing, maybe I'm misunderstanding the revelatory nature of this article (or just don't have enough knowledge)... I don't see why it's surprising that several languages have a word equivalent to "huh".

[devilyoudont]

This is interesting, would any of you give me some book recommendation about universal features of languages? I'm not talking about grammatical structures or thing like that, more like the sounds to refer to "mother" and "father", this "uh" affair and so on.

By the way, here in Spain we say "eh?"

I'm not aware of what books you should read, but you may find this wikipedia article interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism

[eido]

In Faroese and Icelandic, it's "Ha?"

EDIT: this mostly comes after someone says something and you didn't understand, so it's a bit like, "Pardon?" But from what I read of my textbook, it has a hint of "huh?" thrown in.