Related to the question about whether facial expressions are universal.
Are there words/verbal expressions/sounds that exist in every language and have the same meaning in every language?
(I’d also count words that are very similar.)
One example, that I believe is universal is M followed by a vowel followed by another M and optionally another vowel, meaning “Mother”.
At least in any language I know, this seems to hold true (mom, Mama, mamma, Mami, …).
Any other examples?
Edit: To clarify, I am not looking for very popular words that have been imported into most languages (like how almost everyone worldwide knows what Ketchup is), but about words that are “native” to humans. So if you pick someone from an uncontacted native tribe and tell them nothing, they would be able to understand/use that word/sound/verbal expression.
I read somewhere recently that “OK” is the most widely used expression accross langages. Not universal per se, but close enough.
this is the product of globalization, more to come
Hi! I’m a linguist, and this topic is one that comes up commonly.
The answer is no. There is no such thing as languages/words that are native to humans. You can have things that are widely shared (mama/papa based on baby-talk as an example), but seeing as language itself is not universal to humans, there is no such thing as a word that is universal.
Feel free to ask any questions if you’re curious!
How common are things like the bouba/kiki effect in linguistics? It seems there are some sounds that are based on something other than learned behavior, how much does this cause commonality in real language?
Hi! Sorry for the delay, took a break from social media.
It’s often an effect of local convergent evolution, effectively.
Like if the group next to you has certain associations, well you’re likely to have similar associations. It’s also hard to verify some of that research due to the nature of how it’s conducted.
No worries, thanks for the response!
Interesting answer, scanning through the Wikipedia article on kiki/bouba it makes sense that we don’t really have solid evidence that it isn’t a learned trait. It may be hard to get a population of people who developed language independently of all other humans ever and see if they maintain the strong correlation with naming kiki and bouba.
So I guess that brings up another question I have kinda wondered about. What is the most “isolated” spoken language on the planet? By that, I mean the language that evolved most independently of other spoken languages. Is there anything interesting that can be learned by comparing such a language to the European languages that are dominant among the global population?
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Great question! Here’s the thing though, the language had to come from somewhere right? The people had to come from somewhere.
The assumptions and associations that make up the basis of language are thousands of years old. Obviously languages change and societies change, but no one has ever protested about the “k” sound being too “harsh” or something, or at least not seriously.
Even an extremely isolated population would likely still be heavily influenced by whatever the parent language is.
Haha I first read your “The answer is no” sentence and thought you were literally referring to the word “no”. If anything would be universal or at least well understand, I would think “no” would be a likely candidate. Guess not!
Just to counter the “Mother” example, in Finnish the word is “äiti”. One could argue “mamma” is also used, but in my opinion it’s just Swedish influence and not really used in the Eastern parts.
The topic is very interesting however, and recently I’ve read about the theory of universal grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar which is a theory roughly saying that every human has an innate biological understanding for certain rules of grammar - independent of upbringing, culture and the like. For example, every human language will distinguish between nouns and vowels and verbs. The concept is fascinating, but so is the criticism. You could argue that the whole idea is just unfalsifiable pseudoscience or post-hoc explanation for what has been observed.
Regarding the “mother” example: Most languages also feature words that describe “mother” but don’t follow the pattern (e.g. “mother”).
I meant the word that is used by babies/small children and in connection with babies/small children.
Does this apply to “äiti”? (Serious question, I have no idea of the Finnish language).
I always figured it’s because it’s one of the first sounds a baby can consciously make.
Universal grammar sounds very interesting, and the criticism is a well. But yeah, it’s kinda hard to falsify this.
On the other hand, these basic elements that universal grammar identifies seem to me (=>not a linguist) like something you can’t do without. I wouldn’t know what a language would do e.g. without a noun/verb separation. There are things and there are actions, which are two fundamentally different concepts. Makes sense that this separation exists in every language.
I don’t know if Finnish kids say “m”-words for their mother, even when small. My kids used to say something like “mama” (or rather “mämä” where “ä” is like “a” in “apple”) to mean basically “I want” and pointing at everything. Very hard to say.
I wouldn’t know what a language would do e.g. without a noun/verb separation. There are things and there are actions, which are two fundamentally different concepts. Makes sense that this separation exists in every language.
I was thinking about this, and a plausible scenario I came up with would be very simple language, where you would only use nouns in a simple setting. Like “food, mouth” would mean eating, “food, storage” would mean store the food etc. You certainly couldn’t build very complex discussions, but some information could be passed. But it’s just a layman’s thought experiment, for whatever it’s worth.
Funny enough, in Russian side Karelian they call mother “muamo”.
Äiti is a loan word from Gothic “aiþei”, which is quite interesting as such words aren’t usually loaned to replace the original. The original Finnish word for mother is “emä”, but this is not used about humans anymore.
Interesting, didn’t know that!
How is universal grammar not falsifiable? Wouldn’t there just have to be one human, natural language that doesn’t follow the presumed rules to falsify?
I think you have to dive deeper into the sources of the article to fully understand that :)
My guess is that the UG is vague enough to allow this criticism. Maybe it doesn’t define the rules well enough, or they are left too general to accommodate for every known language.
There is reason to believe that there is some fairly universal mapping of sounds to meanings, even if the sounds are made-up nonesense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Most people in the world understand what “fuck off” means
I’m far from any kind of authority on this, but I think you’ll find the similarities in language (like ma mama mom mum mother mummy) come from the fact that very many languages today stem from the same root languages.
What I find far more interesting is where they diverge.
Ananas Anana Aнана́с Ananass Nanas Mananasi
… In English?
Pineapple…
Wtf!
Edit: I’ve just remembered reading that “mama” and “papa” come from the sounds that babies make naturally…
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/why-does-mother-sound-the-same-in-so-many-languages
In the 13th century, Frederick II was the Holy Roman Emperor. He supposedly carried out a famous language deprivation experiment where he had infants raised by foster mothers who were not allowed to talk to them–they could only feed and bathe then. This was to see if there is a natural human language, he thought Greek or Hebrew might emerge. It turns out that the children all died. In sociology this is taught as proof that humans need language and social interaction to survive. But the whole story comes from a single Franciscan monk who was apparently not a fan of the emperor, so there’s some doubt.
I would put some doubt on that story, since most children that were born deaf still survive.
Also, in many orphanages throughout the centuries, children often didn’t get much more care than described in that experiment.
You’re thinking critically, which is good. But your bias is showing.
need language and social interaction to survive
Being deaf does not preclude one from gaining language or interacting socially.
Don’t worry, I can hold a basic conversation in British Sign Language.
Being deaf does preclude you from hearing spoken language, which was what the mentioned experiment was about. It was specifically about a “natural human language” to emerge. That is why I brought up that point.
The better argument was the second point, which you glossed over:
Also, in many orphanages throughout the centuries, children often didn’t get much more care than described in that experiment.
If you read stories of orphanages <1900, you will see that this experiment wasn’t really unique, but instead the de-facto standard for orphanages. Actually being fed and bathed might have been an improvement to many of these orphanages.
But you don’t even have to go that far. Check out for example the “works” of Johanna Haarer. She wrote the main book teaching women in Nazi Germany how to raise their children. And the main points there were:
- Give the children just what they physically need
- Do not socially interact with the child at all
- If the child screams, lock it into it’s room
- Emotionally deprive the child as much as possible
A whole generation was raised with these principles.
And while that created a ton of traumatized people, there was still not an incredibly high death rate among these children.
Also, check out this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
There are quite a few examples (especially in the “Raised in confinement” section) of children being raised without any human (or even animal) contact at all. Still they didn’t just die from lacking social interaction. They were severely impaired, many of them for their whole life. But they lived unless they died of some actual medical condition.
If that story is true, there was no communication with these children. But children born deaf still learn to communicate via sign language or other motions. The language becomes non-spoken, but is visual and very rich and expressive.
I am able to hold a basic conversation in British Sign Language, don’t worry, I do understand the concept.
But if you know your history, you also know that widespread sign languages are a comparatively recent thing. For most of human existence, not being able to hear/speak was equated with a mental disability. You can still see this in many languages like e.g. in the English word “dumb”, which means “not being able to speak” and “not being intelligent”.
Quite a few deaf children over the millennia grew up in severely understaffed orphanages, because their parents didn’t want to raise a deaf child that would never return their investment. And still many of these children did grow up, in spite of never learning any meaningful language.
Sadly enough, we have a similar case in the extended family. They have a child that was born deaf, but he was only diagnosed as deaf at the age of 4 (it still baffles me how it’s possible for parents to not notice that their <4 year old can’t hear them). His vision is also severely impaired. His parents are conspiracy theorists, so they didn’t believe the doctors and they didn’t accept any medical/psychological/pedagogic help for this kid.
He’s now in his mid 20s, and he can still not communicate in any meaningful way, because he never learned to. He is now in some form of daycare, and the staff there told the parents that he is too old to learn any meaningful form of communication, because he didn’t when his brain was young enough to learn the concept of languages (signed or spoken).
But, I digress: My original mentioning of deaf people was to disprove that it “not hearing spoken language kills children”. But the second point that I brought up (children growing up in orphanages where they are massively neglected) is something that nobody picked up, even though that’s the stronger point.
There is not a single word that’s universal to all languages.
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Even if there had ever been one at some point, there are languages that have/had word retirement as part of the culture speaking it: If a word is used as someone’s name and that person dies, that word is now taboo and a new word is needed to refer to what the old word stood for.
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Conlanging, especially by laypeople, often explicitly makes up most or all of its vocabulary from scratch or uses cyphers to make the connection invisible. I wouldn’t be surprised if a people made up their own secret language from scratch, maybe initially with very similar grammar, that developed into a native language for a community.
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Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like “fart”, use a two part word that rhymes with it, like “raspberry tart”, then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with “raspberry” meaning “fart” and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.
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Sign languages are languages as well, and in multiple instances developed from the ground up without influence from the surrounding spoken languages.
Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like “fart”, use a two part word that rhymes with it, like “raspberry tart”, then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with “raspberry” meaning “fart” and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.
So that’s where “blowing raspberries” came from? Pretty neat.
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“mhm” to signify you’re still listening and following along seems pretty universal to me.
Same with “huh?”
Not even that.
For example the Spanish will use “éeeh” and the Portuguese “áaah”.
I’ve heard those described by a voice coach as “resting sounds” and from my observation they depend not just on the language one speaks but sometimes even on regional accent.
Waving to say Hi or Hello seems to be close enough to universal at this point. It’s not completely universal, since there are some cultures, like the Sentinelese that might be isolated enough that they would not understand what it means, but for the most part, you can go most places in the world, wave at someone, and reasonably expect it to be interpreted as a greeting (whether greeting a stranger is appropriate in the culture is another thing entirely).
Various noises are also fairly universal, since humans mostly make the same kinds of noises. A sneeze may vary slightly in how it is written out, but it’s near-universal in its interpretation (if you’re a human). Same for a scream.
Well, in Georgian language “mama” is the word for father and “deda” is the word for mother so.
As to the actual exoressive words that are not about items then no, I don’t believe there’s any “universal words” - some words kinda became “natural” for many cultures like “ok”, “'alo” (when answering a call). Yet Turkish for “ok” is “tamam” and older folks might not understand “ok”. In my experience even sounds are not quite the same across the globe.
Overall I think there’s definitely a way to universally express basic needs and feelings like anger, sadness, confusion, etc. with sounds and expressions combined - people might not get the cause but they’ll get the point.
P. S. On the second thought - crying is quite universal, yeah.
The closest thing to a universal word is a scream. After some experience nearly all humans–regardless of region or native languages–can tell the difference between a scream of sudden fear and the scream of a mother who’s child just died.
The scream of pain is a bit cultural/regional (“ow!”, “fuck!”, “damnit!”) but I’m guessing most humans could tell what someone means when they shout any given sound or word after accidentally banging their finger with a hammer or stepping on a lego brick while barefoot.
