Is huh a universal word? (2013)

We sampled 31 languages from diverse language families around the world in this study, and we found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English Huh? Indeed, to have such a word, specialized for clarifying matters of understanding, only makes sense when a fully functioning cooperative system of communication (i.e., human language) is already in place — babies don’t use it, infants don’t use it perfectly, but children from about 5 have mastered it perfectly, along with the main structures of their grammar. Our starting point was a finding we reported in another study (Enfield, Dingemanse et 16 al. 2013): that many spoken languages provide two basic ways of signalling communicative trouble: an interjection like ‘huh?’

Source: huh.ideophone.org