At least 31 languages have a word very similar to ‘huh?’

“Huh?” is a humble expression, often a near-involuntary linguistic response, but behind this simple interrogatory palindrome is an extraordinary truth — it’s also universal. According to research conducted in 2013 by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, a version of the word can be found in nearly every language on Earth. Researchers analyzed 31 languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Icelandic, and Indigenous tongues, and what they found was that every one included a word similar in both sound and function to the English “huh?” For example, in Mandarin it’s a?, Spanish e?, Lao a?, and in Dutch he? No matter the language, the word includes a relaxed tongue and rising pitch, and if there’s a sound before the vowel, it’s an “h” or a glottal stop (a consonant sound made by closing the glottis, the space between the vocal folds). Although there is some variation in pronunciation, the word shows staggeringly little difference among languages compared to what might be expected.

Greek is the oldest European language.

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Although the Basque region is located in both Spain and France, its native tongue, Euskara — the oldest European language — shares no origins with either language. No one is entirely sure how Euskara, which is still spoken, originated; it’s one of the great linguistic mysteries.

This raises the question: Is “huh?” even a word at all? Perhaps it’s an innate interjection like a scream or a sneeze, or a nonlexical conversational sound like “ummm” or “aaaah.” Yet the researchers noted several factors that point to “huh?” being a full-fledged word. For one, it’s learned (as opposed to animal sounds like grunts), and children don’t use the word until they’ve started speaking. And even languages without an “h” sound still create a close approximation of the word “huh?” The researchers chock this linguistic similarity up to “convergent cultural evolution.” In the animal kingdom, convergent evolution occurs when two animals develop the same traits due to their similar environment (for example, how sharks and dolphins have a similar streamlined look). In a linguistic sense, convergent evolution occurs when pressures in human conversation — like a lack of information that necessitates a need for clarification — create a universal requirement for a word that is quick and easy to pronounce. In time, all languages naturally arrived at more or less the same response to this need: “Huh?”

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