November 27, 20244 min readOuch! Linguists Find Universal Language for PainFrom ouch to ae to yakayi, languages across the world exclaim pain using similar-sounding words, hinting at a common originBy Allison Parshall Richard Drury/Getty ImagesWhat would you say if you suddenly stubbed your toe on a doorframe? Depending on how much it hurt, you might cry out in pain, unleash a stream of expletivesor utter a very specific exclamation, such as ouch or ow.Most languages have a word that that serves as interjection for expressing pain. In Mandarin, its ai-yo. In French, its ae. And in several Indigenous Australian languages, its yakayi. All have sound elements that seem quite similarand thats no coincidence, according to a new study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Researchers found pain interjections are more likely to contain the vowel sound ah (written as [a] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA) and vowel combinations that use it, such as ow and ai. These findings may point back to the origins of human language itself.Across every country, you see this overrepresentation of [a] in pain interjections, says the studys senior author Katarzyna Pisanski, who studies vocal communication at Frances National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). It was a really strong, robust effect. Pisanski and her colleagues also found that [a] dominates the nonlinguistic, often involuntary cries of pain, called vocalizations, that people utter around the world. This suggests that words like ouch may have been shaped by the more primal sounds of pain that humans evolved to makepossibly well before language or speech developed.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Maa Ponsonnet, the studys lead author, first noticed the similarity between yakayi and the French ae while studying Indigenous languages of Australia. Obviously, this is a very naive observation, says Ponsonnet, a linguist who also works at CNRS. You shouldnt draw any inference from observations of just two languages. So Ponsonnet and her colleagues scoured dictionaries and databases of 131 world languages for interjections that express pain and two other basic emotions, disgust and joy. The sample included dozens of language families from Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa and Europe.The researchers found striking statistical similarities in pain interjections across languages. In fact, these interjections resembled one another across languages more than they resembled other words of the same language. This effectwhich did not hold true for interjections expressing joy or disgustwas driven by one category of vowels in particular: [a]-like ones that often combine with others to create sounds such as ai and ow.It doesnt often happen that a hypothesis ... is tested on such a large scale and comes out so clearly, says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who also studies interjections.The pattern suggests that the words we humans use for pain are not as arbitrary as many other words. Instead they have likely been shaped by some common factor. Could those similarities come from the primal, nonlinguistic sounds that seem to automatically spring from us humans when we get hurt? Research on this is scant, so Ponsonnet joined forces with Pisanski, who studies the evolution of vocal communication in mammals, to conduct another experiment. The researchers recruited 166 speakers of English, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish or Mandarin to produce the sounds they would make if they were experiencing pain, disgust or joy.This time the team found thatfor each emotionvocalizations contained similar vowel sounds across those five languages. For disgust, the most common vowel was [] (pronounced like uh); for joy, it was [i] (pronounced like ee); and for pain, it was the now familiar [a].The fact that [a] was overrepresented in both primal vocalizations and interjections for pain suggests that these two types of utterance may be related, Pisanski says. Its possible that words like ouch and yakayi have been shaped by the involuntary sounds we evolved to make in order to signal pain or distress to one another.For disgust and joy, the results tell a different story. While the vocalizations for these emotions are similar across the world, their interjections were far more diverseperhaps because these feelings carry more cultural dimensions than pain, Pisanski suggests. Pain is pain, I think, no matter where youre from, she says. Its a biological experience.Our shared biology has impacts across many aspects of language. Researchers are continually discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, in which the intrinsic nature of a word has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary (meaning, for example, that there was nothing in the structure or sounds in the word bird that would intrinsically make someone think of an actual bird).Yet iconicity often does show up all over human language. Signed languages, long overlooked by many linguists, employ a lot of symbolism: in American Sign Language, bird is formed by using a finger and thumb to mime a birds beak opening and closing. And in spoken languages, the term onomatopoeia refers to words that imitate sounds directly, such as bang or splat. Many types of birds, such as the cuckoo and chickadee, have been given names that echo their calls.But these connections between form and meaning can be so abstract that theyre all but invisible until revealed by researchers. For example, theres the classic bouba-kiki effect, in which people around the world are more likely to associate the nonsense word bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiked one.This is [whats] beautiful about sound iconicity and symbolismbecause somehow we all have a feeling about this, says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguist at the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Germany. Its amazing to see that people kind of agree on them. In a paper published last week, also in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Ćwiek and her colleagues showed that people associate the trilled R sound with roughness and the L sound with smoothness.Finding out when unrelated languages do things in similar ways brings home our common humanity, says Dingemanse, who in 2013 found that Huh? and similar words in other languages are universal in conversation. No matter how much languages differand that is also fascinatingthey also unite us.