In Finnish, there’s two common filler words (oh, all too common…)
“Niinku”, meaning pretty much the same as “like”, and
“tota”, which means something like “umm”.
Here in Busan, I’ve noticed quite a number of people saying [ye] or [nae] (both meaning [yes]) as filler. The choice for which word to use depends on the formality of the sitution; [ye] being more formal.
It always surprises me when the true filler words* (umm) translates into a multisyllable word. It would seem hard for such a word to actually take up any amount of time.
*I don’t consider like a true filler word in English, since it does often convey meaning. True filler words can replace one another (or silence) without changing the meaning of the sentence.
“Alora” means something like “well…”.
The one I immediately thought of is “sai”, which means, and is used as, “you know”.
I remember ‘also’ (al-soh) being used a lot in Germany, which is roughly ‘so’.
The Dutch non-word filler par excellence has got to be “hè”. It took me ages to train that out of my English and I hear many otherwise near fluent Dutch English speakers screamingly signpost their Dutch-ness by coming out with stuff like “nice day, hè”.
Swedes use ‘typ’ in exactly the same way.
I have a Polish friend who speaks relatively good English but is really not fluent. He has a tendency to say “yes” where an English speaker would say “okay” or “right” or “eh” – so where I would say “we were talking, right, and then he…” he would say “we were talking, yes, and then he…” I wonder if this is because an analogous structure exists in Polish.
Someone mentioned the Spanish “este”. There’s also “pues” (identified sometimes with indigenous Mexicans when they speak Spanish).
The British seem to use the phrase “sort of” in this way. At least, the phrase pops up a lot when it isn’t necessary, and wouldn’t be used by most Americans.
You can identify people from thereabouts of Pamplona because they (we) tend to end proposals and questions with “pues”. “Let’s go then”, “what did he say then”… amos pues, ¿qué dijo pues?
Germans use “halt”, which means “just”, as a similar punctuation to “like”.
A polish lad I knew when I lived over there would have every second or third word as “halt” much like a valley girl would say “like”.
Or “ba” (short for “bara” = only).
In Germany we say ja (yes) or ne (which isn’t really a word and means something like right) and if we think about what to say next we say hier (here).
We like to finish sentences with weisst? (you know) or Alter (dude).