Amazing stuff! How painful, no diversity! 😊
"... Although there are an estimated 7000 languages spoken worldwide, new research suggests the noises people make when they’re in pain sound pretty much the same around the globe.
Humans across cultures tend to vocalize in response to emotions. Some of these noises, known as expressive interjections, have linguistic elements (words like “Oops!” “Wow!” or “Yikes!”), while others don’t follow any linguistic structure at all (screams, cries, and bouts of laughter). When scientists analyzed nonlinguistic expressions of pain, joy, and disgust from 131 different languages, they found that each of the three emotions yielded distinct vowel sounds. They also discovered that pain interjections typically feature similar open “a” vowels and wide falling diphthongs (like the “ou/ow” sound in “Ouch”). They didn’t find similar consistent vowel patterns for joy and disgust interjections, which surprised them. ..."
Humans across cultures tend to vocalize in response to emotions. Some of these noises, known as expressive interjections, have linguistic elements (words like “Oops!” “Wow!” or “Yikes!”), while others don’t follow any linguistic structure at all (screams, cries, and bouts of laughter). When scientists analyzed nonlinguistic expressions of pain, joy, and disgust from 131 different languages, they found that each of the three emotions yielded distinct vowel sounds. They also discovered that pain interjections typically feature similar open “a” vowels and wide falling diphthongs (like the “ou/ow” sound in “Ouch”). They didn’t find similar consistent vowel patterns for joy and disgust interjections, which surprised them. ..."
From the abstract:
"In this comparative cross-linguistic study we test whether expressive interjections (words like ouch or yay) share similar vowel signatures across the world's languages, and whether these can be traced back to nonlinguistic vocalizations (like screams and cries) expressing the same emotions of pain, disgust, and joy. We analyze vowels in interjections from dictionaries of 131 languages (over 600 tokens) and compare these with nearly 500 vowels based on formant frequency measures from voice recordings of volitional nonlinguistic vocalizations. We show that across the globe, pain interjections feature a-like vowels and wide falling diphthongs (“ai” as in Ayyy! “aw” as in Ouch!), whereas disgust and joy interjections do not show robust vowel regularities that extend geographically. In nonlinguistic vocalizations, all emotions yield distinct vowel signatures: pain prompts open vowels such as [a], disgust schwa-like central vowels, and joy front vowels such as [i]. Our results show that pain is the only affective experience tested with a clear, robust vowel signature that is preserved between nonlinguistic vocalizations and interjections across languages. These results offer empirical evidence for iconicity in some expressive interjections. We consider potential mechanisms and origins, from evolutionary pressures and sound symbolism to colexification, proposing testable hypotheses for future research."
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