Thread by @ArrantPedantry

T-Rex asks, "What's the sequence of sounds that sound intelligible in the most languages?" Turns out we can answer this question with linguistics! (Though @ryanqnorth probably already knows this because he studied linguistics.)

qwantz.com/index.php?comi…

(Though it looks like T-Rex is asking about phrases, and that becomes much trickier, because then you have to consider syntax and morphology rather than just phonology. But we can at least take a stab at saying which sequences of sounds make words in the most languages.)

I think there are two main questions here: which sounds are the most common, and which syllable structures are the most common? (Because at the bare minimum, a word consists of at least one syllable.)

Some sounds are nearly universal across many languages; some are pretty rare. The /a/ sound (that is, a Latin "a"), for instance, is found in about 86 percent of languages surveyed (but not in English!), while the /æ/ sound (as in "cat") is found in only 7 percent.

I'm getting this from PHOIBLE, by the way, which apparently has data from over 3,000 languages. That's somewhere close to half the languages in the world. phoible.org

According to PHOIBLE, /i/ (as in "me"), /u/ (as in "moo"), and /a/ (close to "ma") are the most common vowels in the world (92, 88, and 86 percent of languages surveyed, respectively).

And the most common consonants are /m/, /k/, /j/ (the English "y" sound), /p/, and /w/ (96, 90, 90, 86, and 82 percent, respectively.

Syllable structure is pretty easy. Some languages allow pretty complex syllables, like English. The word "strengths" has three consonants, a diphthong (depending on dialect), and three or four more consonants at the end (depending on whether you have an epenthetic /k/ in there).

Other languages, like Hawaiian and Japanese, allow only fairly simple syllables, usually consisting of just a consonant and a vowel. But languages like English also allow simple consonant-vowel syllables, so they're pretty universal.

So it looks like sequences like /mi/, /mu/, and /ma/ would be likely to exist in something like 80 to 90 percent of the languages of the world. /ki/, /ku/, and /ka/ would be pretty close behind.

English already has /mi/ ("me") and /mu/ ("moo"), and /ma/ is pretty close to the English pronunciation of "ma" (which usually has a vowel slightly further back in the mouth).

We also have /ki/ ("key") and /ku/ ("coo" or "coup"), and /ka/ is pretty close to some non-rhotic pronunciations of "car" or some dialects' pronunciation of "caw".

Of course, even if "ma" is a nearly universal word, a phrase like "me ma moo" is much less likely to be intelligible around the world. So my guess is that there aren't really any phrases you could utter around the world that would actually be meaningful in those languages.

Certainly there'd be nothing along the lines of "Hi please don't kick anyone, that's for darn sure."

Sorry to dash your dreams, T-Rex.

It looks like I wasn't quite right about the status of /a/ in English. The short answer is that it depends on which dialect you're talking about. See this thread for more details: