ooh ... ahh ... what's that called?

July 21, 2013 7:51 PM

what are the things called when you make sounds that are not words, but convey some emotion? i remember reading an exercise, about the length of a paragraph, demonstrating the different noises people make.

for example, when you say "uh-huh" that means agreement. "oooOOOoohh" expresses that you just understood something. what are those sounds called?

if you have a link to the exercise i'm thinking about please share it.

posted by cupcake1337 to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

Interjections?
posted by lollusc at 7:57 PM on July 21, 2013

Are you thinking of backchanneling? Something that's used (roughly) to show you're engaged with the speaker in some way or another?
posted by DingoMutt at 8:17 PM on July 21, 2013

Grammatically, I think they're known as 'interjections.' Casually, I think they're known as 'filler words.' Academically, I think they're known as 'non-lexical utterances' and fall under the broad category of 'speech disfluencies.'
posted by john-a-dreams at 8:27 PM on July 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

Interjections show excitement or emotion. They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point (or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong).
posted by mefireader at 8:36 PM on July 21, 2013 [13 favorites]

Response by poster: yes, interjections, thank you.
posted by cupcake1337 at 8:49 PM on July 21, 2013

Phatic utterance.
posted by ottereroticist at 9:36 PM on July 21, 2013 [1 favorite]