Huh? is not trivial. It might seem frivolous or even trivial to carry out scientific research on a word like Huh? But in fact this little word, along with others that function in similar ways (e.g., ‘Sorry?’ ‘What?’) is an indispensible tool in human communication. Without such words we would be unable to signal when we have problems with hearing or understanding what was said. Because conversation moves along so quickly, if we did not have reliable ways of signaling trouble, we would constantly fail to stay ‘on the same page’ in social interaction. While Huh? may seem an unlikely topic of scientific research, in fact human communication, and thus common understanding in social life, relies heavily on the use of such linguistic devices.
Huh? is universal. We sampled languages from around the world in this study, and we found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English Huh? This is an exception to the normal situation, namely that when words in different languages mean the same thing, they will usually sound completely different: compare, for example, these very different-sounding words for ‘dog’: inu in Japanese, chien in French, dog in English. Why do these differences between the sounds of words across languages occur? Because language does not impose any necessary connection between sound and meaning in words (a principle that linguists call ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’). This study shows that ‘Huh?’ is a rare exception to this otherwise strong rule.