How do you call the words a speaker uses when he is nervous, like "um", "ah", "like"?

In my native language there's a word for that kind of words, but I'm not sure how they are called in english.

7 points · 6 comments · view on lemmy.world

6 Comments

DemSpud@reddthat.com · 13 pts · 3y (2 replies)

I believe they're called filler words

pglpm@lemmy.ca · 7 pts · 3y

Or simply "fillers", see last definition here.

The general grammatical category is interjection.

MrRobot@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 3y

Thanks!

Lumun@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 3y

You might find https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics) interesting if you want to see what the filler sounds are in lots of different languages

Moonguide@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 3y

Crutches, in my language. We got our collective ears chewed out about it by a hard ass teacher in school. I think I don't use crutches no more, but I could be wrong.

Doctor8@infosec.pub · 3 pts · 3y

Filler words is the most correct answer because words like "like" do actually have meaning, but there is also something called embololalia (also spelled embolalia), the insertion of meaningless sounds/words into speech, which would include "uh, ah, mmm," etc.