A team of researchers from the Max Plank Center for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (Netherlands) has discovered, after analyzing ten different languages, that the interjection used to show incomprehension is similar in all of them . The "Huh?" in Spanish, "Huh?" in English and "Hein?" in French they would already reveal said phonetic similarity, a sign that the expression has a greater relevance in interpersonal communication than expected.
As explained by the scientific news agency SINC, Linguistics experts analyzed the actual use of the expression in ten languages around the world : Siwu (a minority language of Ghana), Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Cha'palaa (a Ecuadorian language), Icelandic, Lao (spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia), Dutch, and Murriny Patha (an Australian Aboriginal language). To do this, they carefully examined 196 audios in which interjection was used naturally, without knowing what language they were listening to. After that, they carried out a phonetic study to verify the quality of the results, which indeed showed a high degree of similarity between the expressions that appealed to the interlocutor.
According to the researchers, the biology of evolution would explain this linguistic coincidence : when different species coexist under the same conditions, they can evolve with the same patterns. This phenomenon is known as convergent evolution.
