Thanks for the explanation. As I said, I’ve heard it quite a bit but never figured out what the heck it meant.
Like not_alice said Japanese has a ton of examples, but the one I most often hear around young people is ‘sa.’
An example, “Hey sa, I sa to the store sa, will go sa, wanna come with?”
They use it in Israel, too.
That or comme. Kobal says tu vois, in Quebec it’d usually be tu sais (shortened as tsé).
Not more than usual. Genre is usually one syllable long anyway, but the ‘r’ is definitely audible.
Yeah, but that’s not exactly a filler, as it has meaning: “este” or “esto” is shorthand for “one sec, I’ve got it on the tip of my tongue, what was it… oh yeah!”
A filler is not just a word which gets repeated often or which has no direct grammatical relationship with those around it: it’s a word used exclusively to fill up the space. They’re the styrofoam peanuts of language.
Ah, “da kine” is Hawaiian for “smurf”! I’m now wondering whether Peyo ever went to Hawaii 
In Italy , I’ve heard ‘alora’ quite a bit as a filler.
You forgot “voila” as well. It’s one of my pet peeves.
Recently saw a Nicole Garcia interview, she must be confusing voila with period marks.
I swear I could kill people who do that, if you got nothing to add, you’re entitled to shut the fuck up. Voilas vont make your sentence more interesting.
You’re right ! And I’m guilty of this one, too. That and “enfin bref” (“finally, in short”), “enfin bon” (“finally, well.”).
That said I usually use these not as filler per se, more to signify “that’s all I have to say about this, let’s change subject please”.
Arabic ya‘nī - it means ‘It means’.
*Wallāh *or *wallāhi *‘by God’ is another very popular filler.
True, but that isn’t half as bad as all the Americans who misuse it while misspelling it “viola!”
Why not viola da gamba while they’re at it?
And then it always registers in my mind as a mangled version or “viole la!” (rape her!) :smack:
I try hard to avoid fillers in my speech, mais voila quoi, ça vient tout seul! I can’t help it, my sentences have a mind of their own 
My eldest drives me mad with her liberal sprinkling of ‘ikke’ (literally ‘not’ but perhaps closer in feel to the English slang ‘innit’), usually shortened somewhat to just ik’. It seems to be a feature of Danish youth speech patterns, at least in our area and her age (10-12). The older ones seem to replace it with ‘fuck’ as far as I can tell :rolleyes:
Oh no, not another wallakwa. I think I could exterminate you all, especially since you’re the same type that also says “nananana” which is the utterestrest form of filler in French.
Cant tell the number of times I’ve recieved instructions where every two words I would get wallakwa, and then, as if it wasnt murky enough (because in truth wallakwa means “I wont even bother of making the effort of trying to make a sentence. You fill out the blanks”) it usually then ends with nananana. Which is the same, but in much worse.
So he has a following there, does he?: Yanni - Wikipedia
Bengali also has a placeholder word – iye, pronounced a little like “yeah.” There are some people who habitually use it – “Uh, why don’t you go find iye and ask him to give you iye so you can get iye done before it gets dark?” You could translate it as “Uh why don’t you go find that guy and ask him to give you that thing so you can get that task done before it gets dark?”
I think the fact that filler words are so common and so natural, especially for younger speakers, is evidence that it has some kind of utility. I also am irritated by overuse of them, but I suspect that aversion to filler words is learned. You probably didn’t start disliking them (or perhaps even noticing them) until you heard someone pointing them out or objecting to them for the first time.
Classic Turkish joke on the Americans… the standard American filler “Um” is nice rude Turkish slang for the female genitalia. When I was learning the language, I couldn’t figure out why my host family was breaking on the floor in giggles for weeks with my drawn out “Ummms” while I searching for the right word… until I was mortified to learn it from their (very cute) 19-year old daughter who took pity on me.
(Yes I’ve confirmed this with other Americans who got caught this way!)
I used to see this all over the place on the internet, usually posted by American women: “And then, wah-lah, you’ve got your (insert whatever here)”. It took me forever to figure out this wasn’t some American saying, but instead that it was what they thought “voila” was.
Bulgarians say “ami” as filler. It doesn’t really mean anything, though - it’s usually translated as “well”. It is pretty funny when Bulgarians speaking English replace anyplace they’d say “ami” with “well”, though. You get sentences like “you have to tell the students that well that kind of behavior is not well acceptable”.
Or if you watch a lot of non-dubbed anime.
English speaker + Anime = sound like a schoolgirl.
Pidgin Smurf: “Hoo, da da kine wen smurf da cah! You nevah see one more bus’ up BMW! Thank Smurf fo da guardrail!”
oh lord.
I spent two years in France 40 years ago and noticed les jeunes saying tu sais (ya know) as fillers.