How Do You Say “Um” In Another Language?

How I discovered that filler words in other languages were a thing

Photo by Dex Ezekiel on Unsplash

I remember my last year in high school when I was taking a couple of AP classes to impress the college admissions officers at the 12 schools (yikes!) I applied to.

We were often reminded in our AP English Literature class that Wikipedia WAS NOT a good reference.

Fast forward fourteen years later and that’s the first place I come to search stuff like “What’s a filler word?”

According to Wikipedia (sorry Ms. Coy-Gonfa!), a filler is “a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking.”

We’re all familiar with the “um,” “like,” and “uh” that we were berated about when giving presentations in school.

But I didn’t really think about these words in other languages until I started teaching Japanese students.

I kept hearing the word “eto” coming up multiple times as my students tried to express their ideas in English.

Because I was used to them inserting Japanese phrases while speaking English, I would jokingly tell them — you know I don’t understand Japanese, right?

But after enough time, I figured out that it had a special role in speaking, something beyond what it actually meant.

That’s when I realized that it was a filler word (figured out after googling, of course!). It was a really cool discovery!

I already knew that in Spanish we had este and in Arabic y3ni, but I didn’t really understand the role of the word as much as I saw it as just another vocabulary word in the language.

And as a teacher and language-learning nerd, I was really excited about it.

As much as we want to think languages are so different from each other, there are TONS of similarities between our language and the ones we study or that others around us speak.

Keeping this in mind might actually make it easier to learn a language.

So the next time you hear a strange word in a language you know, don’t just think about the meaning of the word but try to process its actual function in the sentence/discussion. It might make things make a lot more sense!

What are some discoveries you’ve made along your language-learning journey?

Comment below!