We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, it’s probably “ouch”.
But what kinds of “pain words” (or “interjections”) do speakers of other languages use to express pain? And do these interjections feature similar sounds across languages, as we might expect if they are reflexive responses?
A new article published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America examines this question for the first time. Our study measured vowels (“a”, “i”, “o”, etc.) in interjections expressing pain, disgust and joy in over 130 languages across the globe. We then compared these with the vowels in nonlinguistic vocalisations (like moans, screams etc.) to test whether interjections and vocalisations share similar sounds.
Our results suggest pain interjections can indeed be traced back to nonlinguistic vocalisations, but the story is less clear for joy and disgust.
Interjections are standalone words that can be used on their own (like “ouch!” or “wow!”). They don’t combine grammatically with other words.
Because linguists mostly study grammatical combinations, for a long time they didn’t pay much attention to interjections. This is why some very basic questions about........