According to a recent study, love may be the universal language and a kiss may be a universal way of showing affection, but there’s a funny, little word that’s truly universal.

A group of Dutch researches traveled round the world and interacted with native speakers of 10 different languages both in large cities and small villages. They recorded the conversations and to their surprise they discovered that, despite the fact that all the languages were different, they all shared one word: “Huh?”

“Huh?” is an interjection used by people when they don’t understand what someone has just said and needs the last word or phrase to be repeated. Major languages as different from one another as Spanish, Dutch, Islandic, Mandarin Chinese, Italian and minor languages spoken in Laos, Thailand, Ecuador, Ghana, Cambodia or Australia all had this little word in common.

Why such a huge buzz around such a little word?: The “Huh?” Factor

Carrying such an extensive research on such a little word may seem trivial but, in fact, it’s very important. “Huh?” along with other little words such as “Sorry” or “What?” play an important role in human communication, ensuring that the dialogue flows naturally between the speakers and that they fully understand what the other is saying. Thus, these words are essential communication tools that help us let others know when we have problems understanding or hearing what was said.

“Huh?”, “Sorry” or “What?” are much more than signals or involuntary responses. They only function within a well established system of communication. In fact, despite the logical variations in the different languages the “Huh?” sound remains the same.

Jonathan Valentine, the founder of Impero, is one of the brains behind a new kind of software program which is being used in schools to monitor the behavior of students who might be self-harming, engaging in under-age sexual activity and bullying via online media.

Language develops fast and there’s nothing which develops at such a pace, particularly amongst young people, than slang. UK teachers have, for a long time, found it difficult to keep up with the continuously renovating trends of modern slang which students incorporate into their daily lives as a means of communicating with each other, both online and offline.

Why has Impero developed this slang decoder software?

The fear of many teachers, and other organizations which work to support young people in a number of ways, is that bullying and self-harm can go unnoticed when adults don’t understand the common slang terms being used by young people to communicate.

The idea behind the software program developed by Impero and so far used in 1400 schools located throughout the UK, is to help teachers and other supervising adults breakdown the coded language that young people use, to keep up-to-date with popular slang and to keep track of young people who are affected by bullying behavior or who show signs of wanting to self-harm.

How was the slang dictionary put together?

The dictionary has been organized into nine separate sections. Each section focuses on a particular issue and lists popular, modern terms used by young people when referring to sexual activity (or “sexting” – sexual activity via text message), suicide, body image, self-harm, adult content, eating disorders, bullying, racism and homophobia.

Impero took help and expert advice from a number of different sources when compiling the dictionary and programming the software. Students from Laurence Jackson School in Cleveland played a major role in the development process, particularly in helping to generate the content of the dictionary itself. However, certain organizations, including the Anti-Bullying Alliance and an eating disorder charity, called B-eat, also helped Impero generate this new software by sharing information about popular modern language trends used by the young people that they come into contact with on a daily basis.

How does the slang dictionary software work?

Impero’s software can be used by schools to automatically scan online conversations and online student activity to check for disguised bullying language or coded language used by young people to indicate that they have suicidal thoughts / desires to self-harm.

Whenever the software picks up signs of abuse or bullying in the modern slang that students are using, it records that information in the automatically generated reports that teachers can choose to download. The dictionary helps teachers to understand modern slang terms, such as “gnoc” (get naked on camera) or “dirl” (die in real life).

When teachers hear phrases in the corridors or read written words that they cannot decipher, they can also use the program as a modern slang dictionary and search for the meaning of these phrases to check whether or not they should be worried about the activity of students under their care.

What might need tweaking?

Even though the software is being used by 1400 schools across the UK and even though it has also been used successfully to track threatening gang culture behavior in the US, there are some areas of the program which still need to be refined. For example, the language used by young people is going to continue to develop. This means the dictionary will need to be kept up-to-date, which is not only time-consuming but requires lots of constant research into young people’s vernacular.

It’s also important to stipulate that slang differs across the country. This means that regional differences need to be taken into account and, at present, the software is pretty standard. The option to add words to the dictionary exists and this is a positive aspect of the program, but the difficulties of using the program on a regular basis are already clear.

Charles Limb, an otolaryngological surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, has reason to believe that the human auditory system was meant for greater things than understanding language and speech. For Limb, language is nothing but “a happy byproduct” of our true aural capacity.

Were we meant for more than just speech?

Language, for many scientists, is what makes us human. It’s what separates us from the animal kingdom and what allows us to master heightened forms of communication and interaction.

Despite the centuries of research which support this theory, Limb believes that the human ability to process more complicated acoustic systems, such as those that we find in music, might mean that the human brain was actually designed to listen to music – an aural activity which he considers to be far more refined than that of processing speech/language.

The human capacity to learn a musical instrument, respond to music and use music as a means of communication, are all reflective of the incredibly refined cerebral system that we have at our disposal. Communicating via speech and language is not nearly half as difficult for our complex brains to achieve when compared with the nuances of musical communication.

What do improvised jazz and language have in common?

In improvised jazz, the musicians communicate just like a group of people do when taking part in a conversation. You can hear statements, responses, questions, chatter which overlaps other chatter and general moods which are then disrupted by unexpected tangents, which take everything off into a new direction.

Jazz improvisations, “take root in the brain as a language,” Limb says, just like conversations we have through ordinary speech. The difference perhaps is that it takes a lot longer for the musician to get to the point where he or she is comfortable enough with the language of jazz to be able to improvise and “converse” through music with the same ease and confidence that he or she would do through ordinary speech.

What’s clear from Limb’s studies is that the language of jazz, just like speech, is based on a series of syntactic rules that all musicians subconsciously abide by. The music of jazz might be “heard” and “understood” without the need for semantic sense, but the syntax of language in jazz is most definitely in place. This is why Limb believes that humans utilize the same areas of the brain when listening to and playing music as they do when using speech to communicate with each other.

Indeed, with improvised jazz (with any music) the idea is to find beauty in the sounds shared. Jazz improvisations demand that the musicians find beauty in the sounds they create, but the meaning of the sounds isn’t important. When we communicate through languages, the semantic quality of what we say is just as important as the syntax. In music, the only thing the ear searches for is beauty. Our aural sense when tuned into to music is much more refined, much more sensual and natural than it is when we use it to communicate through speech.

In a sense, listening to music is the fine arts experience of human aural activity. Language communication is nothing short of cheap, fast-food for the ear.

Beethoven – a final thought

Taking Limb’s investigations to the next level, a quick look at Beethoven is particularly worthwhile. If Beethoven continued to write music long after he went completely deaf, perhaps our capacity to feel and process music is in fact the true purpose of our auricular abilities.

Beethoven couldn’t hear what people said to him, he became deaf to language but never to music. His capacity to “hear” and create music continued to function.