5 Nearly Universal Speech Quirks—No Matter What Language You Speak

The English language has at least half a million words, depending on what dictionary you’re looking at. English consists of letters running from the left side of the page to the right, while other languages run from right to left or vertically. English has 24 consonants (more than you can probably name off-hand), while Hawaiian has just eight, and the Ubykh language has more than 80. Clearly, languages can be very different from one another.

But in a few strange ways, all these very different languages behave exactly the same. 

1. The Number of Ideas Passed Per Minute
2. The Way We Invent Names of Colors
3. How Common Words Are
4. Word Association
5. “Huh?”

The Number of Ideas Passed Per Minute

Some languages sound like they’re a lot faster-paced than others. If we want to hammer out just how quickly people across different languages speak, we can use a measure called speech rate, which records the number of syllables people pronounce per second.

When someone speaks in English, we can expect them to speak six syllables per second. In Thai, we can expect a speech rate closer to four syllables per second, while Japanese would be closer to eight. If all of those values sound high to you, and you’d predict something more like one syllable per second, try reading this paragraph aloud, including such dense phrases as “syllables per second,” and see how surprisingly quickly you do it.

However, none of that tells you how quickly any language passes ideas along. One language might use a great many syllables to say the same thing that a different language says more concisely. A different measure called information rate aims to track how many ideas each language passes along each second or minute.

It turns out that the information rate is roughly constant across all languages. When a language takes more syllables to translate the same text, its speakers will say their translation using a higher speech rate. In one study, linguists had speakers of 17 different languages read out the same passages. These texts included several different types of writing, from customer service complaints to simple first-person narratives, and the translations varied a lot in how many syllables each contained.

But every language ended up taking the same length of time to say a passage, no matter how many words or syllables each translation contained.

Of course, speech rates and information rates vary a lot from person to person, with even one English speaker perhaps talking twice as quickly as another. But on average, very different languages use the same information rate, which linguists calculate as 39 bits per second. Since this is constant across cultures, this has got to say something fundamental about the rate at which human brains take in information. Otherwise, there’s no obvious reason different languages would tend toward the same info rate despite pacing themselves so differently. 

The Way We Invent Names of Colors

In some ways, languages vary in how they approach color. In dozens of languages, people use a single word for both green and blue, and the people who speak these languages appear less able to distinguish between the two compared with other people who have separate words for each. Still other languages, such as Greek, have different words for light blue and dark blue, distinguishing between them as strongly as English distinguishes blue from green. 

From that, you might conclude that we name colors totally arbitrarily, and some imaginary culture that newly appears on some island could invent any number of color systems, focusing on whichever colors they happen to like best. But though languages offer different categories of color, we’ve found that they all start out and all develop the same way.

If a language has just two words to describe colors, it will have one for “light” and one for “dark.” If it has three, the next word the language will develop for color will describe red. As it develops further, next comes green, and then comes yellow. This means that not all languages have a word for green, but if they do, they’ll definitely have a word for red. If they don’t, they also won’t have a word for yellow. 

Then, only after naming yellow does a language develop a word for blue. That might sound especially surprising since green and blue seem so similar to each other, but it makes sense. We start by distinguishing between colors that are most different from each other and only afterward create more subtle distinctions. 

Alternatively, naming blue after yellow is surprising because we have a specific cell in our eye for perceiving blue, but we don’t have one for yellow. That’s why we treat blue as a primary color, along with red and green, when we talk about light. Despite that, in defiance of biology, every language decides it’s more important to name yellow than to name blue. Much of the planet is blue, thanks to the oceans and the sky, but languages all seem content to call those shades green or white until eventually coming up with a distinct name for the color of sunlight. 

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How Common Words Are

The most common word in English, by far, is the. The second-most common word is of, though you’ll see a few sources claiming it’s be, since that includes variants like is and was. Third-most common is to, and the fourth is and. 

If you take a large enough sample of English, you can expect the to make up one-tenth of the words there. Of will make up around one-twentieth. To will make up around one-thirtieth of the text, or close to 3 percent of it. The pattern continues like this for quite a while before eventually breaking down. 

Naturally, other languages don’t use words with the same frequency. The is not the most common word in Vietnamese because it does not even exist in Vietnamese. But across almost all languages that we’ve studied, the most common word will always appear twice as frequently as the second-most common word, just like the appears twice as often as of in English. The most common word will also appear thrice as often as the third-most common word and four times as often as the fourth-most common word.

We call this pattern Zipf’s law, after a linguist named George Kingsley Zipf. George Zipf also came up with another language law that notes how, on average, the longer a word is, the less commonly it will pop up in speech. This one feels a bit more intuitive, but it’s still surprising how consistently it holds true across different languages. In fact, it even appears to hold true when we analyze vocalizations let out by whales.

Word Association

This next one is by far the most famous of the phenomena we’re covering today, but even if you’ve seen it before, read on. There may be more to it than you’ve heard.

Below are two shapes. Let’s say that one of the two is called “bouba,” and the other is called “kiki.” Which would you say is which? 

If you’re like the vast majority of people, you’ll guess that the first one is kiki and the second is bouba, even though those are two nonsense words that don’t objectively have to represent anything in particular.

Those shapes go back to a research paper from almost a century ago, and the bouba-kiki effect became a lot more well-known in the last few years. Once you learn that everyone assigns the shapes the same words you do, you might easily theorize why this is.

“Bouba” may be gibberish, but it brings to mind words like bubble, boba (which comes from “bubble”), or boob, all of which refer to roundness. “Kiki,” meanwhile, might bring to mind stuff like kicking, cracks, or cacti, which are all sharp. However, when we jump from English to languages that have none of those words, the pattern remains. People who speak French, Italian, or Polish call the round shape “bouba” and the spiky one “kiki” just the same as you.

Another tempting explanation might cover those multiple languages. Though those languages use different words, they all use the same alphabet (the Latin script), in which the letters b and o are round, while k and i are not. But that doesn’t quite solve this either. Experiments on people who use languages with totally different scripts produce the same results. Thai speakers show the same preferences, as do speakers of Greek, Russian, and Farsi. One test on a thousand people showed the preference holding true across 85 percent of languages. 

It even holds true among blind speakers (who have to feel objects representing the two shapes rather than looking at drawings). It even holds true among children who have yet to learn how to read. 

We have a term for the idea that words take their form from the thing they represent: iconicity. Iconicity definitely pops up with some words, such as those that use onomatopoeia—for example, we clearly chose “meow” to sound like an actual cat meowing. Other words show no sign of it. The bouba-kiki effect offers such strong evidence of iconicity (even though bouba and kiki aren’t real words) that it’s actually changing our idea of how human brains evolved.

Until now, linguists have never been sure whether language first came in the form of pronounced words or in the form of physical gestures. The bouba-kiki effect has convinced some linguists that sounds and ideas are so tightly linked that brains must have started processing words first. 

“Huh?”

Okay, that last bit might have gotten a little confusing. It might have left some of you saying, “Huh?” Fortunately, if you vocalize your confusion in that manner, you can likely count on everyone understanding it, no matter what language they use. 

If you go to Ghana and meet someone who speaks Siwu, they will express confusion saying the very same “huh.” They won’t spell it the same, but the interjection will sound the same and serve the same purpose. If you go to Laos, you’ll hear the same thing from someone speaking Lao. Same deal with Cha’palaa in Ecuador or Murrinh-Patha in Northern Australia, along with more familiar languages like Dutch or Mandarin. 

One interesting part of this is that if you took a course to learn any of these languages, no teacher would instruct you to learn this word. No teacher ever told you to say “huh” in English, either. Huh does not appear in many foreign dictionaries. Nevertheless, it’s understood in dozens of languages and possibly all languages, based on researchers’ observations. 

The only question that remains is whether something so fundamental and universal qualifies as a word at all. Some say no, not even in English, arguing that it instead counts as a “non-lexical token.” Similarly, crying when you’re in pain isn’t a word. Others insist that “huh” is. A word doesn’t stop being a word just because everyone understands it. It just ends up proving that everyone has more in common than we thought.