Fyllingu

Fyllingu is a term coined in contemporary discourse studies to designate the repertoire of fillers, hesitations, and boundary-marking devices that speakers deploy to manage turn-taking and negotiate meaning in spontaneous speech. It encompasses phonetic fillers such as uh and um, lexical fillers like you know or I mean, and discourse markers that perform pragmatic functions.

The concept emphasizes cross-linguistic and cross-register variation, noting that languages differ in tolerance for pauses and in preferred fillers. In casual English, utterances often feature frequent uh or um and prosodic cues, while other languages rely on pauses, repetition, or lexical items with social meaning to achieve similar effects.

Researchers analyze large speech corpora, dialogue transcripts, and real-time conversations to identify patterns of fyllingu usage. In computational linguistics, modeling fyllingu supports more natural speech recognition and generation; in language teaching, awareness of fillers helps learners manage fluency and listener expectations.

The term remains modestly used and is not yet standardized across the field. It reflects an attempt to formalize a set of otherwise informal communication strategies rather than a separate grammatical category.

Related concepts include discourse markers, filler words, hesitation phenomena, and turn-taking cues.