Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the ...

Oops! I spilled some coffee. Hmm… Let me think about it. Woohoo! That’s great news. Let’s celebrate. To the untrained ear, sounds like “oops” “hmm” and ...

Finn accepts a challenge by Feifei to speak using only interjections. Does he manage to do this? Listen to the programme to find out. The sounds are followed by facial expressions Feifei: Hello, Finn.

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be ...