When Does “Uh-Oh!” Enter a Child’s Vocabulary?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan. I’m calling from the Seattle area.

Hey, Susan. Welcome.

Hi, Susan. What’s up?

Hi there. My question is about the phrase, -oh.

I have a granddaughter. She’s about one and a half.

And recently I kind of heard her say, -oh, for the first time, as she’s really learning a lot of language.

Something fell on the floor and she said, -oh.

And it reminded me of how often my own two boys would say that when they were little, especially as toddlers.

And it made me curious if maybe -oh, as simple as it is, started simply as a baby mimicking adult saying oh no until adults started saying -oh themselves or if it was maybe kind of reversed and -oh was already its own little expression.

This is an interesting question because it plugs into some history of language and child development and language growth.

And 18 months is a great stage at which to witness so much happening in the language of children.

If she’s an average child, I’m sure she’s above average, but if she’s an average child, she has a large number of two-word expressions now.

At 18 months, -oh is perfect for her because it also comes at a time where she’s starting to learn about values between yes and no, values between safe and unsafe.

She’s starting to learn that there are gray areas between extremes, if you know what I mean.

And -oh lets her know that she can express dismay without adding worry.

It says something is wrong, but it’s not a big deal.

Or this isn’t quite right, but maybe we can fix it.

It has nuance.

And so that’s really important for a kid that age.

And so there’s a reason that -oh kind of hits at about that age, and kids pick it up.

They pick it up from their parents.

The history of it is that it started as an Americanism, strangely enough, where we modified O-O, like O-H, O-H, which is simply a doubled form of O, the O that you might say when you’re surprised or alarmed.

Which we got as English speakers from the French, and the French got it from Latin.

So it’s just like this really long history that leads us to this drawing attention to things and then being modified once it reaches the United States at some point in the 1800s.

And we do this glottal stop.

We kind of restrict the airflow in the back of our throat.

-oh, -oh.

You can kind of hear that there’s something unusual happening there with that first sound.

Right.

Oh, that it’s just such a simple expression, but it just kind of just, it’s more, it’s almost less of a word and more of a instinctive reaction in a sound that isn’t necessarily a word that means the same thing every single time.

Like maybe like you’re saying, oh, oh, could be surprise or oh, oh, disappointment or it represents like a feeling.

Yes, exactly. So it serves as an interjection, but it’s a linguistic feature known as a discourse marker.

And what discourse markers do is they change what we expect.

We interject it into the conversation to say, in this case, this is not so great.

So discourse markers might sound or at first look like they’re kind of irrelevant or useless because they’re often small.

And they often just sound not like words, just like you said, they kind of sound like noises.

But they so much have a purpose.

They so much do a job.

And -oh really does a job here.

It’s got value.

It’s doing a service to the conversation and to the discourse between the child and the adults around the child.

Well, Susan, it sounds like you’re going to continue to have a blast.

And we hope you’ll keep us posted.

I will.

It is going to keep being a blast.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks for taking my call.

Have a great day.

Sure.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Susan.

877-929-9673.

Thank you.