Did you ever stop to think about the words we use when we can’t think of which words to use? I uh, mean, the er… yeah. Those words.
Um. Er. Ahhh. Uhhhhh.
Technically, these little words are called “fillers” (a specific kind of disfluency) by linguists. They are the speech equivalent to the spinning icon while a YouTube video is “buffering” on a slow internet connection. They fill in the gaps when our brain spazzes out (giving us time to think, and allowing us to keep the floor since there isn’t room for someone to easily interrupt). But surprisingly, studies actually show that they also help our children learn to talk. Apparently by giving the baby’s brain time to anticipate what will be said next, is helpful.
All languages has these fillers. But like everything else in language, the forms used are different. Apparently Chinese speakers will say nèi ge and zhè ge (“this”) as a filler. In some languages the filler has a meaning. In others, like English, it is a meaningless placeholder. ASL (American Sign Language) has signs to use as fillers!
Tagalog speakers in the Philippines do not say um or er or anything like that. In fact, for the most part, they don’t insert a word at all. They hang on to a syllable of one of the “real” words.
My wife and I were getting some exercise at a swimming pool a couple of weeks ago and the pool attendant (bless him) had a radio playing. Thankfully, it wasn’t the popular genre here of two (or more) DJs pretending to laugh themselves sick for an hour. It was music, and we were glad that it was not disco (still alive in the Philippines) or techno. Instead, for the most part, the playlist was pop love songs. Maybe a little cheesy and from the 80s, but pretty listenable. I’m always up for a little Air Supply, aren’t you?
But then at 2 p.m. a new dj started his shift. So he had to talk for about 5 minutes to get his show running. And he gave us a good demonstration of Tagalog disfluencies (you hear them a lot on live “news patrol” shows, too.) I’ll try to explain it…
Instead of inserting a word, he would hang on to any word ending in the “ah” sound, or any word ending with ng. This is handy since the way Tagalog forms the plural of a noun is the say manga before the noun, so hanging on and saying mangaaaaaaaa gives the speaker time to remember what noun he is going to say. And not only do lots of words end with ng, but yong means something roughly like “the” or “that,” so again, the speaker gets extra time to think.
The more time he needed to think, the longer and more tenaciously he would hang on.
In English it might come out like, “Good Morningggggggg. Today play a songgggggg by theeeeeeeeeeee band called the Fourrrrrrrrr Seasons from their debuuuuuuuuuuut albummmmmmmm Sherry and Others.”
(For any Pinoys or other Tagalog speakers, you know what I mean. Something like “Mangaaaaaa kaibigan, heto yonggggggggg unang awit ngggggg mangaaaaaaaa….” Ganoon.
You can see how five minutes of this was enough to make us work on our underwater laps at the pool.
I’d love to hear from any of you who speak other languages. Er, what are your um, filler words?
Thanks for Livia Blackburn for the heads-up on the link showing how filler words help child language acquisition!