Expressions of Pain May Have a Common Origin

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November 27, 2024

4 min read

Ouch! Linguists Find Universal Language for Pain

From “ouch” to “aïe” to “yakayi,” languages across the world exclaim pain using similar-sounding words, hinting at a common origin

By Allison Parshall

Richard Drury/Getty Images

What 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 expletives—or 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, it’s “ai-yo.” In French, it’s “aïe.” And in several Indigenous Australian languages, it’s “yakayi.” All have sound elements that seem quite similar—and that’s 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 study’s senior author Katarzyna Pisanski, who studies vocal communication at France’s 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 make—possibly well before language or speech developed.

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Maïa Ponsonnet, the study’s lead author, first noticed the similarity between “yakayi” and the French “aïe” while studying Indigenous languages of Australia. Obviously, “this is a very naive observation,” says Ponsonnet, a linguist who also works at CNRS. “You shouldn’t draw any inference from observations of just two languages.” So Ponsonnet and her colleagues scoured dictionaries and databases … Read More