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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The worst one today is people adding "uhhh" to the end of every sentence. "What did you do-wuuuh?" "Where should we go-wuuuh?" "Can't you see-yuhhh?" It grates on you even worse than vocal fry and like inserting like into like everything you like say.

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Loads of languages around the word have a sentence-final particle that doesn’t mean anything on its own but serves as a vocative particle, creates a bond between speaker and listener, softens the assertion for politeness sake, etc. Some varieties of UK English already used innit? that way. It’s pretty normal human linguistic behavior.

Yeah, Malay has "la" which gets tacked onto a sentence or phrase following rules that are intuitive but I doubt I could write down.

My mum could use a single "la" as an entire sentence and we knew exactly what she meant, rarely something good.

Bruh

Quite a good equivalent, although "la" is very heavily used and by everyone. Perhaps Bruh will spread to that point, who knows?

In Ireland people add "like" to the end of a sentence like.

Quite a different way to use "like" than what this article talks about.

I am an American traveling in Ireland now now and have been enjoying this! Much better to save the excess nonsense for the end of a sentence rather than confound the meaning with it.

“So” as well.

But that one is particularly grating because it's exactly the same thing that young children do when they're whining or begging.

If a linguistic behavior has spread widely enough for you to notice it, then obviously the bulk of people (or the bulk of that speaker’s people, at least) don’t find it grating.

Obviously so, but that doesn't affect the fact that it grates on me.

This particular thing appears to be largely generational and rather regional so I don't encounter it frequently.

> Some varieties of UK English already used innit? that way.

Perversely, the inhabitants of Birmingham (UK) favour "issit" for that purpose.

Who is doing this and where?

I hear this a lot from younger people in Europe and the US.

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