Huh?

Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?

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.

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

1. a quick overview of our key findings
2. a summary of what we did in the study
3. a press release about the study