Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items

“Huh?” is a real word, found in much the same form across ten languages, because every language needs it.

Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F. & Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items. PLoS ONE, 8(11), e78273.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078273

Checked

Against the abstract, 15 September 2026

Why it is on the list

The authors show that “huh?” is a learnt word, not a grunt, and that its form and function are strikingly similar across languages, because every conversation needs a way to say “I didn’t get that”. It is in the course for one reason: a student embarrassed to say “sorry, what?” is embarrassed by a universal feature of human language.