Is “Huh?” a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items

Linguists studied recordings of casual conversations in ten very different languages from around the world, looking at what people say when they didn’t quite catch something.

In every one, people used a short, questioning sound that is remarkably similar to “huh?”. Most words differ wildly between languages, but this one seems to be shared by humanity. Huh!