The word that exists in all human languages, according to research

Our languages are incredibly diverse and it is highly unlikely to find a word or a handful of words that sound the same in all languages. Except that there is a word that is shared by all human languages,  according to research. Surprise, surprise..the word is ‘ huh’ .  Weird, huh! Well, it turns out that this is probably a universal word. 

Let’s explain first how this word works in more detail. Consider the following made-up conversation:

A: We decided to move to New York.

B: Where?

A: To New York.

Speaker A makes a statement, and Speaker B follows up on that by asking the question “Where?” which targets only a portion of the original statement, i.e., it is possible to infer that Speaker B had no trouble comprehending the message that they decided to move somewhere, but s/he presumably missed the final word. So, s/he requested a repetition of this information by asking “where?” and Speaker A supplied this information in his/her next turn. And this is what is termed by conversation analysts as repair .

But, what if, for some reason (i.g. extreme background noise), speaker B failed to comprehend the whole statement and wanted to request the repetition of the whole statement? How do you think the dialogue would have unfolded in this case? That’s where the word huh  comes in. Take the following dialogue:

A: We decided to move to Alaska.
B: Huh?
A: We decided to move to Alaska.

Huh  is a very specific repair strategy that does not traget some part of the statement but rather the statement as a whole. That is why repairs that are provided as a response for a  huh  are quite long and elaborate, typically reiterating the whole statement. 

Now, here is the fun part. The word huh  may very well be a universal word that is shared by all human languages. Conversation analysts Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, conducted  an interesting cross-linguistic study in which they have shown that  huh  is possibly a universal word. They recorded bits of informal conversation from 31 dialects across 5 continents and suggested that the word ‘ huh’  (and its variants) is possibly a universal repair initiator that exists in all languages, performs the same function and sounds roughly the same across languages. Here is a sketchy illustration: