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.
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6 replies
I believe they're called filler words
Or simply "fillers", see last definition here.
The general grammatical category is interjection.
Thanks!
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
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.
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.