From ‘ouch’ to ‘yakayi’: The universal cry of pain

The expression of pain unites humanity like no other. Whether it’s the English “ouch,” the Japanese “ai,” or the Spanish “ay,” this interjection has proven to be a linguistic bridge capable of connecting cultures. Even in Indigenous Australian languages — they use “yakayi” to express pain —there is one constant: the presence of the vowel “a,” written or spoken. This is the conclusion reached by a 2024 study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America after conducting a two-pronged investigation. On the one hand, they examined dictionaries from 131 languages to see how pain, joy, and disgust are reflected in each. On the other, they obtained recordings of 166 people expressing these emotions in five major languages: Spanish, English, Japanese, Turkish, and Mandarin.

Obtaining these recordings, in which participants had to express emotions naturally, was a challenge in itself. Aitana García Arasco, co-author of the study, and the rest of the team devised a questionnaire to get speakers of these five languages to record themselves expressing pain, disgust, and joy. Some were done online. “The person accessed the questionnaire and did it autonomously,” García explains in a video call from Lyon, where the university that coordinated this study is located, along with the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Hong Kong. She participated in the collection of these expressions in person.

The in-person collection posed ethical and methodological challenges. “No, we weren’t going around causing physical pain to the participants,” García jokes. “The idea,” she explains, “is for you to imagine yourself hurting yourself,” and in that context, make an effort to express a genuine reaction.

However, this poses an obvious problem: “It’s important to distinguish between spontaneous vocalizations and those produced on demand. Humans have a unique ability compared to other animals: we can make these sounds without any real stimulus.” Other studies have shown that when an individual accidentally hits themselves, the most primitive parts of the brain are activated. With his method, that doesn’t happen. “Only the parts responsible for language are activated,” García explains. But for the purposes of the study, it was sufficient.

García spent a month between Kyoto and Tokyo, where two researchers in her field put her in touch with students who served as subjects for the study. “You need a bit of privacy to keep them calm,” García says, so she left them alone so they could complete the questionnaire freely. First, she asked them about their age, gender, whether they had lived in other countries, whether they spoke other languages, and their exposure to social media. “The globalization generated by social media and learning other languages can change people’s cultural identity and reactions,” she explains.

García then presented them with up to 15 fictional situations, to which the students had to react as realistically as possible. “One of them was, for example, imagining that you had won a prize and had to go celebrate with your friends and family. How would you express yourself to show joy?” In the case of languages such as Turkish and Mandarin, the process was conducted entirely online. Participants accessed a virtual studio where, after answering basic questions, they recorded the requested vocalizations. Pain, they concluded, is not only a universal physiological experience, but also a phonetically global one. The vowel “a,” produced with the mouth open, is the acoustic center of this expression.

The impact of social norms

This contrasts with disgust and joy, emotions that don’t show such consistent patterns. “In all societies, there are cultural norms, and these modulate the sounds we make when reacting to certain situations,” the researcher explains. “But pain is universal; it’s pain in France, Spain, or Japan. It’s a direct physiological response; it has a very important biological component.”

The overrepresentation of the “a” suggests that words like “ouch” (pronounced “auch”) and “yakayi” have been shaped by the involuntary sounds we make to signal pain or distress to each other, Katarzyna Pisanski, another of the study’s researchers, writes in the journal Scientific American.

However, this expression also contains significant differences. In more expressive societies, such as Mediterranean ones, it’s common to verbalize pain openly, while in more reserved cultures, such as Japan, expressions tend to be more restrained.

García emphasizes that this conditioning begins in childhood. “A baby cries the same way anywhere in the world, but over time they learn to adjust their expression to social norms.” A clear example is laughter: in Spain, laughing out loud is perceived as a sign of joy, while in Japan it is considered rude, and many people cover their mouths when doing so.

The idea of investigating this universal connection arose from a chance observation by Maïa Ponsonnet, a French linguist and lead author of the study. She noticed striking similarities between the interjections of pain in an Indigenous Australian language, which Ponsonnet was studying at the time, and French.

“She thought these concurrences might not be a coincidence and wondered if there were common acoustic patterns in other languages,” García explains. The goal of this and similar studies is to explore how non-linguistic human vocalizations are connected to the origin and development of human language. “There are major unanswered questions about how language comes into being, how we learn to modulate and articulate sounds to establish modern languages.”

Tendencias is a project by EL PAÍS, with which the newspaper aims to open an ongoing conversation about the major future challenges facing our society. The initiative is sponsored by Abertis, Enagás, EY, GroupM, Iberdrola, Iberia, Mapfre, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), Redeia, Santander, and strategic partner Oliver Wyman.

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