Huh: A Universal Word?

There are few, if any, words that are the same across all languages and language families, but a team of linguistic researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands think they might have found one:

Wait, huh? Huh? Is “huh?” even a word? I’d always considered it more of a verbal tic, but the researchers argue that it is, and that it’s one of the only words that needs no translation. They listened to recordings of people speaking ten different languages from different language families around the world, and analyzed written texts from 21 more. They’ve concluded that “Huh?”(or a very similar sound) is used in all of these languages in the same way: as an attempt to clarify meaning when one person isn’t quite sure they heard what the other one was saying.

While they have not yet verified the existence of “huh?” in all of the world’s almost 7,000 languages, but head researcher Mark Dingemanse told, “We are ready to place bets.”

As for whether or not “huh” is a word, the researchers argue that it is:

Why does “huh” or something very close to it appear in so many unrelated languages? In an article published on the PLOS ONE website,  Dingemanse calls it  “the result of convergent cultural evolution: a monosyllable with questioning prosody and all articulators in near-neutral position is the optimal fit to the sequential environment of other-initiated repair.”
In other words, its such an easy way to stop someone and indicate that you might need them to repeat whatever it is that they just said, that it’s evolved to sound the same in almost every language.
Interesting, huh?

LinkedIn, Now In Chinese

Last week, social networking juggernaut LinkedIn announced the release of their newest localised website in Simplified Chinese.  This is by no means the first attempt at translation for LinkedIn- the service is now available in a total of 22 different languages. However, moving into the Chinese market presents potential pitfalls not found in most other countries.

For one thing, expanding into China means that LinkedIn is obliged to cater to the Chinese government, censoring posts and collecting data on members in that country. Gary King,  the director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, told Time that around 13 percent of all Chinese social media posts are censored. Issues related to censorship have caused both Google and Twitter to give up similar attempts to court Chinese consumers. Read more

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