By Helen Vollmer, President, Edelman Southwest
In our world of icons, infographics and emoticons, man is still looking for better, smarter ways of effectively communicating universally. While I acknowledge (and embrace) that visual communications is now a bellwether in quickly getting an audience’s attention, a recent study from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands got my attention.
It turns out, according to researchers, that ‘huh’ is one of the world’s most universally understood words. That’s right—this monosyllable that I spent years getting my children not to say in response to a question, works as well in Mandarin as it does in Dutch. It’s as easily understood on the aboriginal plains in Australia as it is the geothermal pools in Iceland.
These linguists looked at other words as well, but only ‘huh’ is found in languages that have little to nothing else in common. Contrary to what my ninth grade English teacher Ms. Seaholm taught me, it appears that language is not a matter of inborn structure (and sentence diagrams), but is instead rooted primarily in social interaction.
Managing common understanding as we talk, confirm and check with others is really the job of words. So while a picture may well be worth a thousand words these days in getting a conversation started, it is stringing simple syllables together that allows us to engage the world around us and get things done.
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