In Panama I hear o sea a lot. It means more or less “in other words” or “I mean.”
As has been mentioned, este and pues are used too.
One of the filler words in Norwegian is altså, which at one point got modified in youth speech to esse. These days you’ll only hear the latter used sarcastically, but altså is still going strong. I hear a lot of liksom, som, skjønner du (“you understand”), and just plain og (“and”), too.
I remember when Caroline ya-know Kennedy was that age.
IME, “Ya’ani” isn’t usually used as a filler in Hebrew – it’s mostly used as a Sarcasm Indicator preceding a phrase… Or as a word meaning “That is,” or “In other words,” used preceding a re-statement or an explanation of something just said.
In general, I think Hebrew use of fillers is relatively lower than, e.g., English – but when used, the most common ones are ka’ze (“of this kind” – pretty similar to “like”) and ke’ilu (literally “as if”.)
The phrase “ka’ze, ke’ilu” on it’s own, OTOH, means “sort of,” usually in the sense of “Yeah…, sort of. NOT!”
The Finnish ‘like’ is ‘niinku’. Used in exactly the same way and just as annoying as the American English equivalent.
Hmmm… on reflection, the second part of what I said is a usage very similar to some usages of “like” in English… So(, like :p,) not quite as unequivocally not like “like.”
Heheh! I transcribe for a living, so this is a subject very dear to my heart! I’ve definitely noticed with younger people, the propensity to use ‘like’ instead of ‘said’, e.g. She’s like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe you said that!’
And yes, when I’m transcribing, I have to type out all those ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’. If someone can tell me how, I could do a count of the instance of those words in a typical one hour file!
There was an interesting interview on the BBC with a linguist (or maybe a social anthropologist) who had studied the use of like in language.
Her take on it was that like can be used as a pure filler (similar to non-words such as um, or ah), but that like also has a specific contextual meaning, which is “I am making a statement that I believe is true to the best of my knowledge, but that knowledge may be incomplete”
So, “My new friend has, like, three brothers” - means that as far as the speaker know, her new friend has three brothers, but isn’t absolutely sure.
In the case of “I was like, ‘Oh, crap’”, there is a similar lack of specificity - the speaker may not have actually said or thought “Oh, crap”, but the like indicates that the approximate sense is correct.
Si
While still vaguely annoying, I find replacing the verb “said” with “like” to be far far less annoying than throwing it in as verbal filler.
“So I like, wanted to go to the store, but like, my mom said I couldn’t go, and it was like, so annoying.”
At least when replacing words it can be used as slang. Compare it with some other slang thrown in:
“So I wanted to go to the store, but my mom’s like ‘You can’t go,’ so I was all, ‘Ma, why not,’ and she goes, ‘You have too much homework.’”
Re Japanese fillers, they also use “sa,” to which I haven’t really discerned a meaning other than a verbal filler. “Ano sa, dansei ga tanjobi pati ni kite, demo sa, kare wa omiyage o mottenakatta.” (So uh, this guy came to the birthday party, but uh, he didn’t bring a present.) Sorry, I’m sure some of my particles (and possibly other grammar) is off. Learning through books and listening to native speakers isn’t the best way to learn proper grammar. But it’s the right idea.
Bulgarians do say both of these words a lot, but I wouldn’t call them filler words precisely. (BTW, it’s actually “haide”, but I know why you wouldn’t realize that. When I asked my Bulgarian teacher what it meant because I kept hearing it EVERYWHERE and couldn’t find it in the dictionary, I asked her “what does the word ‘ayd’ mean?” It’s actually a Turkish word and its been borrowed by, AFAIK, every country in the Balkans - and by me. I can’t seem to stop saying it, so all of my friends know what it means now.)
For filler words, people say “ami”, which is akin to “well”, and “znachi”, which means “means”. One of my (Bulgarian) Peace Corps people would use “well” whenever she would have used “ami” in Bulgarian when she was speaking English, which sounded pretty funny:
“Well, you have to well, speak slowly because the kids well, need to learn well, proper pronunciation.”
I don’t think so. It seems to me that when people use the "I was all like. . . " phrase they’re talking about their feelings or thoughts. Maybe its a method of paraphrasing feelings and thoughts. I’ve had a few girlfriends that would tell me a story and use the ". . . and I was all like, ‘get outta here’. . . " line. When you asked them “you said that?” they said, “oh, no. I didn’t SAY that.”
But, yeah, I guess it’s not exactly filler in that instance.
Yup, those are filler words too, but they are not so annoying, the “tipo” thing is used mostly by upper middle-class twits and pronounced with an extreme pretentious accent, somethink like “tiiipooo”.
I once had to travel for about an hour with a girl in a car, she was talking in her cell phone from start to finish and must have used “tipo” at least 3 times every five seconds.
The Dutch can use “toch” (lit. “nevertheless”) to distraction at times, using it in ways that robs it of any meaning so it becomes either a filler or a slight amplifier. “Dat wist ik toch niet” (I didn’t know that" )
But it’s used differently - “like” is often followed by a small pause, like a placeholder. “Toch” typically isn’t.
I never realised, like, that there were so many ways, like, to fit ‘like’ into a conversation, like, and ya know, like “Damn!” like, well what more can I say, like?
It is “este”, often said with a long last “e” to fill all the blank “esteeeeee”. “dizque” is also used in the rest of Central America and its close relative “y que” is also common. And I am under the impression that “pues” is more Andean than Central American.
“O sea” is also extremely common in Venezuela and I think I have also heard it a lot from Spaniards.
Also “ves?” (you see?), “verdad?” (right?) and “ok” which gets double bad points for being not only a “muletilla” (a crutch word, which is what they often call filler words in Spanish) but also an Anglicism.
Some of my German roomates used “halt” all the time, especially those from the former East Germany.
I’ve enjoyed seeing all the Latin American regional variants.
Am I the only one who hears a fair degree of “pero . . .” in Spanish and even Spanglish? Is this associated with any particular region/population?
On the Japanese, I’d add that sometimes when I hear someone thinking out loud, sort of stringing thoughts together, as well as “ne” I may hear a handful of “so des”'s thrown in there.
In Swedish “like” as a filler word would translate to liksom, while another would be alltså.
Not exactly a filler word, but in Sweden young people has for decades been using the odd bá word, which always has had annoyed elder people, because the is no such word. It is used instead of said or did, and such, and is actually a very practical word, when looked at more closely. When a teenager tell about something that happened, it usually sounds something like this.
This is actually how often the word is used while telling something. When Swedes turn about 20 years old, they suddenly stop using this expression, but generation after generation of teenagers can’t live without it.
One of my Japanese friends when I was living in Tokyo used さあ (saa) a lot, to the point that on at least one occasion I remember other people in the group poking fun at her by using it every other word, much in the same way an American might mock a friend who they think over-uses “like.” One that I think is less common now but was big a few years ago is ending sentences or phrases with じゃん (jan), a contraction of じゃない (ja nai), which more or less translates to “isn’t it.” I’d say the American equivalent would be “y’know.”
If anybody has ever heard the second *Trigun *soundtrack, there’s a dialogue track called “West Slang” where the accents of the main characters are swapped. Wolfwood, who normally speaks like someone from Osaka, takes on an exaggerated Tokyo accent, complete with tons of jan. It’s absolutely hilarious if you can understand enough Japanese to get the jist.
ひど過ぎる … じゃん!
Some French use “tu vois” (lit. “you see” but used more as “you know”), others “parait que” (lit. “seems that” used as either “I’ve heard” or “they say”). Usually accompanied by cutting/swallowing parts of the phrase :
J’suis révéillée tard tu vois donc j’ai pas pu aller au magasin tu vois.
Parait que le Wii c’est super, parait que tu tranpires tu vois.
There’s another on which one of my bosses uses to the Nth degree, he’s Tunisian but in France for years … I once counted him say “Je veux dire” (lit. “I want to say” / “I mean”) over forty times in a single minute (why yes our meetings are riveting, why do you ask?). I once had a student whose reflex to punctuate with “donc” (lit.“so” / “thus”) was so strong it passed over into her English “I’m a manager donc of a team who calculate donc the number of minutes used donc by other networks …”