Huh? may be the one universal word, global study of languages suggests

Humans speak many languages, but we may all be united in our confusion. A new study examined languages from around the world and discovered what they say could truly be a universal word: "Huh?"

Researchers travelled to cities and remote villages on five continents, visiting native speakers of 10 very different languages. Their nearly 200 recordings of casual conversations revealed that there are versions of "Huh?" in every language they studied - and they sound remarkably similar.

While it may seem like a throwaway word, "Huh?" is the glue that holds a broken conversation together, the globe-trotting team reported in the journal PLoS ONE. The fact that it appears over and over reveals a remarkable case of "convergent evolution" in people's language, they added.

"Huh?" is a much-maligned utterance in English. It's seen as a filler word, little more than what can be called a conversational grunt, like "mm-hmm". But it plays a crucial role in many conversations, said Herbert Clark, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies language.

When one person misses a bit of information and the line of communication breaks, there needs to be a quick and effective way to fix it, he said.

"You can't have a conversation without the ability to make repairs," said Clark, who wasn't involved in the study.

For this study, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands set out to show that "Huh?" had the status of a fully fledged word, though an odd one. They also wanted to see whether other languages had a similar word with a similar function.