In linguistics, a filler is a sound or word that is spoken in conversation by one participant to signal to others that he/she has paused to think but is not yet finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig, which refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown.
In Arabic, يعني yaʿni (“I mean”) and وﷲ wallāh(i) (“by God”) are common fillers.[2][3][4]
In American Sign Language, UM can be signed with open-8 held at chin, palm in, eyebrows down (similar to FAVORITE); or bilateral symmetric bent-V, palm out, repeated axial rotation of wrist (similar to QUOTE).
In Catalan, eh /ə/, doncs (“so”), llavors (“therefore”), and o sigui (“it means”) are common fillers.
In Czech, tak or takže (“so”), prostě (“simply”), jako (“like”) are used as fillers. Čili (“or”) and že (“that”, a conjunction) might also be others. A person who says jako and prostě as fillers might sound a bit simple-minded to others.[5]
In Dutch, eh, ehm, and dus are some of the more common fillers.
In Esperanto, do (“therefore”) is the most common filler.
In Filipino, ah, eh, ay, and ano are the most common fillers.
In Finnish, niinku (“like”), tota, and öö are the most common fillers.
In French, euh /ø/ is most common; other words used as fillers include quoi (“what”), bah, ben (“well”), tu vois (“you see”), and eh bien (roughly “well”, as in “Well, I’m not sure”). Outside of France, other expressions are tu sais (“you know”), t’sais’veux dire? (“you know what I mean?”), or allez une fois (“go one time”). Additional filler words include genre (“kind”), comme (“like”), and style (“style”; “kind”)
In German, a more extensive series of filler words, called modal particles, exists, which actually do give the sentence some meaning. More traditional filler words are äh /ɛː/, hm, so /zoː/, tja, and eigentlich (“actually”)
In Hebrew, eh is the most common filler. Em is also quite common.
In Hindi, matlab (“it means”) and “Mah” are fillers.
In Hungarian, common filler words include hát (well…) and asszongya (a variant of azt mondja, which means “it says here…”).
In Icelandic, a common filler is hérna (“here”). Þúst, a contraction of þú veist (“you know”), is popular among younger speakers.
In Mandarin Chinese, speakers often say 这个 zhège/zhèige (“this”) or 那个 nàge/nèige (“that”). Another common filler is 就 jìu (“just/precisely”).
In Norwegian, common fillers are øh, altså, på en måte (“in a way”), ikke sant (literally “not true?”, “no kidding”, or “exactly”), vel (“well”), and liksom (“like”). In Bergen, sant (“true”) is often used instead of ikke sant. In the Trøndelag region, skjø’ (“see?” or “understand?”) is also a common filler.
In Persian, bebin (“you see”), چیز “chiz” (“thing”), and مثلا masalan (“for instance”) are commonly-used filler words. As well as in Arabic and Urdu, يعني yaʿni (“I mean”) is also used in Persian. Also, eh is a common filler in Persian.
In Portuguese, tipo (“like”) is the most common filler.
In Romanian, deci /detʃʲ/ (“therefore”) is common, especially in school, and ă /ə/ is also very common (can be lengthened according to the pause in speech, rendered in writing as ăăă), whereas păi /pəj/ is widely used by almost anyone.
In Russian, fillers are called слова-паразиты (“vermin words”); the most common are Э-э (“eh”), это (“this”), того (“that”), ну (“well”), значит (“it means”), так (“so”), как его (“what’s it [called]”), типа (“like”), and как бы (“[just] like”).
In Serbian, znači (“means”) and ovaj (“this”) are common fillers.
In Slovak, oné (“that”), tento (“this”), proste (“simply”), or akože are used as fillers. The Hungarian izé (or izí in its Slovak pronunciation) can also be heard, especially in parts of the country with a large Hungarian population. Ta is a filler typical of Eastern Slovak and one of the most parodied features.
In Slovene, pač (“but”, although it has lost that meaning in colloquial, and it is used as a means of explanation), a ne? (“right?”), and no (“well”) are some of the fillers common in central Slovenia, including Ljubljana.
In Spanish, fillers are called muletillas. Some of the most common in American Spanish are e /e/, este (“this”), and o sea (roughly means “I mean”).[6], in Spain the previous fillers are also used, but ¿Vale? (“right?”) and ¿no? are very common too.
In Swedish, fillers are called utfyllningsord; some of the most common are öhm, ja (“yes”), ba (comes from “bara”, which means “just”), asså or alltså (“therefore”, “thus”), va (comes from “vad”, which means “what”), and liksom and typ (both similar to the English “like”).
In Urdu, yani (“meaning…”), falan falan (“this and that”; “blah blah”), umm, and aaa are also common fillers.
In Telugu, ikkada entante (“Whats here is…”) and tarwatha (“then…”) are common and there are numerous like this.
In Tamil, paatheenga-na (“if you see…”) and apparam (“then…”) are common.
In Turkish, yani (“meaning…”), şey (“thing”), “işte” (“that is”), and falan (“as such”, “so on”) are common fillers.
In Welsh, de or ynde is used as a filler (loosely the equivalent of “You know?” or “Isn’t it?”). Ym… and Y… are used similarly to the English “um…”.
Remember that this stuff is really important for fluency of speech. I’ve encountered a bad attitude among language teachers before: “we don’t teach filler words, because that’s not “normative” vocabulary, and it encourages students to sound unsure.” But that’s so, so wrong.
All people use filler words in conversation and even in formal settings. It’s a way to keep the flow of speech when the train of thought pauses; it holds the audience’s attention and actually helps maintain clarity of thought. What’s more, these words are instrumental for language learners, who need to pause more often in their speech than native speakers. Allowing them to pause without breaking into their language (saying a filler word in their language) or completely breaking the flow of their speech allows them to gain fluency faster.
My high school Japanese teacher did it right: “etto” and “anou” were in the second lesson. Teach filler words, people!! And if you’re studying a language and don’t know them, look at this list!! It has a lot!
So I formally took American Sign Language for 2 years because I am in High School and I feel it would be useful to share some Websites, Apps,Videos and other things for people who are interested in learning Sign Language or already know a little bit and are just looking for some links! I did not find these on my own, this is a list a teacher gave me. Hope this can be useful to people and please share so more people are aware of this post in case they are interested in learning! Thank you!
a shout out to all the people who started saying “same” as a joke once in awhile but now use it for the most random things like a car honking their horn at another car
good luck to linguistics in the future trying to explain this
@dedalvs explain. You are the future of linguistics! 😀
Future?! I’m the ghost of linguistics past! The future are those here on Tumblr who have yet to take the reins. Seize ye your day like a man taking a picture of a hotel carpet! (Because that’s literally mostly what I do now.)
Every language has a way of expressing this idea (i.e. that we feel the same way as someone else or something suggested by another situation). In English, some that used to be popular are “I feel ya” or “I know the feeling” or “Tell me about it” or “You’re telling me”. Those’ve been used in reference to situations before for humorous effect (I’m kicking my brain trying to remember a specific one on The Simpsons, but it hasn’t come to me yet). “Same” is great because it’s short and expresses the same idea. (I swear, I feel like the younger generation is better at coming up with short stuff like this. My generation is the generation of wordy phrases like “too much information” and “I know you are but what am I”, which sounds positively Shakespearean by today’s standards.)
“Same” has also really interested me because I’ve seen the exact same expression years before it came into vogue in English, but in American Sign Language. ASL has a sign that means “same” and you can use it in the standard way, but you can also use it the Tumblr way. We basically learned it as a way to say “me too”. I doubt the one influenced the other (convergent evolution seems more likely), but it does set Tumblorgs up to know this small facet of ASL grammar rather intuitively. There’s a nice explanation of the sign on this site. Image below from that site:
And actually, just let me copy this paragraph from the explanation on that site, since I think it’s so perfect:
The sign for same is “directional.” By that I mean, the direction in which you do the sign can provide information about the subject and object of the verb. For example, if I slide the “Y” hand back and forth between you and me the sign can mean:“me too” "you and me, both" "I agree with you" “I’m similar to you” You don’t have to add a separate “ME” or a separate “YOU” sign, the meaning is created by the direction of the sign.
So yes, there’s actually more grammar in the ASL sign than in English “same”, but if you see how directionality works with this in ASL, you’ll see how it’s very simple to extrapolate from using it with someone you’re talking to to say “me too”, or using it with someone nearby to say “just like them”, or even using it with a situation to say “I feel just like that hedgehog which can’t even right now”:
Anyway, that’s about the gist of it…? Think I went on a bit of a tangent. Oh well. The point is this: Why isn’t anyone using my word “Tumblorg” for someone who uses Tumblr?! I swear, I will make Tumblorg happen!
True story, a Japanese friend of mine who is very fluent in English mused on her FB:
“Tell me about it” -this phrase is just confusing. It actually means I don’t need to talk about it anymore? Hmm.“
I explained what it meant, she said:
“Thinking
back on Japanese, we also have similar expressions. We say “keep going”
when someone gets annoying and we don’t want to listen anymore.“
Last year, estifito and I solicited contributions to a collaborative linguistmas carol based on Deck the Halls, but I didn’t end up compiling them at the time. So here it is, better late than never:
Deck the vowels with diacritics Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa ‘Tis the season for linguistics Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa
Fast away the old slang passes Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa Prescriptivists are blinkered asses Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa (Rose Fox in the Disqus comments)
Polyglots are now practicing Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa Ignoramos su code switching Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa (@twentyonezero)
Speak we now with odd syntax and Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa Violate a Gricean Maxim Schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa schwa (@meaninglessmonicker)
Feel free to add another verse if you didn’t get a chance before!
real talk I want to know how exactly Lin-Manuel Miranda figured out that the words “southern,” “motherfuckin” and “democratic-republicans” go so perfectly together
it’s a good, fun mix of things. you get three trochees in a row. then the three disyllabic phrases get doubled (and double timed) into two tetrasyllabic words that complete a line of pentameter. to break this down.
a trochee is a two syllable (disyllabic) word that gives us a stressed syllable, then an unstressed one.
southern, mother, fuckin’
three in a row is an emphatic treat for the ear, especially because english tends to flow better with the more common iambs (unstressed, stressed, disyllabic). this alteration in what we expect is great for a phrase as crass as this one.
speaking of crass alterations. this trio is also really great and perfect because you get some good assonance between the three words as well as an unexpected break (crass alteration!!!) on “fuckin’”. The first syllable of all three words have a nice “uh” sound: sou-, mo-, and fu-. Then, looking at the second syllable of the three words, you get nice assonance on “-thern” and “-ther” (it’s not just assonance, let’s just call it a slant rhyme at this point), only for the almost perfect trio to be broken by “-ckin’.” We already associate “fuckin’” with some unruly emphasis and for a near perfect trio of assonant syllables to be broken by this word provides for a personal id-y satisfaction, I’m sure.
this unexpected break is followed immediately by a change in the foot. we double from disyllabics to tetrasyllabics. i know a lot less about meter and rhythm for music than i do poetry, but i think there’s also a syncopation that happens with the first three trochees. the strong beat of music comes on the unstressed syllable which makes for a nice groove. again, because i don’t know music as well, i can’t say if this is a function of the syncopated rhythm or just a stroke of luck and genius hand in hand, but in spite of this sing song-y switching off of the stressed syllable on the disyllabic slant rhymes with the strong beat, the stressed syllables of the tetrasyllabic words somehow land on the strong beats.
democratic, republicans
so accompanying this shift from disyllabic words to tetrasyllabic words is not only a change in rhythm from what i believe are some groovy syncopated eighth(?) notes to straight sixteenth notes, but also a resolving of lyrical syncopation with the stressed syllable returning to the beat. Throw in measured out rhyming between the two “-ic-”s following the stressed beat and you get a good resolution.
so, why it sounds perfect together? got you covered.
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
This doesn’t surprise me. I’d also propose that since Chinese has no plural nouns, only context, that a greater sense of belonging to a group or community is present among native Chinese speakers, while English speakers feel more individualistic.
So I feel like everyone should immediately go read Ted Chiang’s amazing SF short story “The Story of Your Life,” which is about learning an alien language that has an emphasis on knowing how the sentence about to spoken will end — which leads to an overall advanced understanding of time itself.
It’s a fantastic story. It’ll massively fuck with your mind. Read it.
Just fun add ons:
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and
Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself…
This yokes into a phenomenon that’s called Fundamental Attribution Error. It essentially means that viewers assign blame or traits to other people generally with less emphasis on situation and more emphasis on personal character. So if someone trips, they’re clumsy not there was a broken bit of sidewalk, etc. This tends to be more pervasive in Western/English language cultures in the experiments they’ve done (though I’m not sure if anything more up to date has been reported on since then, these data can date back to the ‘50s, iirc) but also do appear in other cultures/non-English language countries as well, but to a lesser degree.
…that a greater sense of belonging to a group or community is present among native Chinese speakers, while English speakers feel more
individualistic…
Cathy Davidson mentions in her book (Now You See It — which is an excellent read on cog/perception and some education stuff! L E A R N I N G) that American mothers vs say, Japanese mothers, also tend to teach their children differently with toys. So an American mother might say, “This is your car!” and a mother from another country might say “This is a car, it goes vrroom” or whatnot. Obvs, this is slacker paraphrasing from me but when the question of language comes up it opens this whole range too of language dictating culture or culture dictating language and ofc both working on and off of each other.
Additional note, semi-related is in Pollan’s In Defense of Food he talks about the language of guilt vs enjoyment when it comes to consuming food and how that spans across cultures. Which is also interesting.
I finally managed to get hold of a copy of my dissertation! You can read it on Google Docs HERE. Please feel free to download and cite the work if it helps you with your own studies. 🙂
You guys, this is 70 pages of analysis of tumblr language and you should probably read it. I know I’m going to.
Kimchi and Justice 