Spotlight: According to researchers, most languages use similar words to express pain. Unlike many other words we use, these words may not be artificial but rather rooted in primitive, non-linguistic sounds.
Most languages have an interjection specifically used to express pain. In Mandarin Chinese, it’s “ai-yo.” In French, it’s “aïe.” In several Indigenous Australian languages, it’s “yakayi.” A new study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America suggests that pain-related expressions across languages share strikingly similar sound elements—and this is no coincidence. Researchers found that pain interjections are more likely to contain the vowel [a] and vowel combinations featuring this sound, such as “ow” and “ai.” These findings may even trace back to the origins of human language.
The study highlights significant statistical similarities in pain-related interjections across different languages. In fact, these expressions are more similar across languages than they are to other words within the same language. This phenomenon, which does not apply to interjections expressing joy or disgust, is particularly tied to a specific vowel category—sounds like “ay,” “av,” and “ah,” which typically combine with other vowels to form pain-related expressions.
Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who studies interjections, remarked, “It’s rare to see a hypothesis tested on such a large scale and emerge so clearly.”
This suggests that the words humans use for pain are not as arbitrary as many other words. Instead, they may have been shaped by some common factors. Could these similarities stem from the primitive, nonverbal sounds that humans instinctively produce when in pain? Due to a lack of research in this area, Dingemanse teamed up with evolutionary vocal communication expert Katarzyna Pisanski to conduct another experiment.
The researchers asked 166 native speakers of English, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, and Mandarin to vocalize the sounds they would make when experiencing pain, disgust, or joy. The team found that for each emotion, people across these five languages used similar vowel sounds. The most common vowel for disgust was [ə], for joy [i], and for pain [a].
However, while joy and disgust sounds varied significantly across languages, pain expressions remained remarkably consistent. Pisanski suggests this may be because emotions like joy and disgust are more culturally influenced than pain. “No matter where you’re from, pain is always pain. It’s a biological event,” she explains.
Source: Parshall, A. (2024, November 27). Expressions of pain may have a common origin. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/expressions-of-pain-may-have-a-common-origin/
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