From Ahoy Ahoy to Moshi Moshi
How to answer the telephone
When Adele sings ‘hello from the other side’, the word ‘hello’ will be widely understood around the world not only as a greeting, but specifically as a greeting for a telephone call. That’s because, in the same way that “LOL” (laugh out loud) or “BRB” (be right back) are internet slang that have entered our lexicon, so was ‘hello’ originally a ‘telephone word’ that has gone viral — not just in English, but across many languages of the world.
The word ‘hello’ existed before Thomas Edison started using it — but his ‘hello girls’ who staffed the first telephone exchanges were required to use the word, and literally through this network effect, it became a common greeting in English. The earlier inventor of the telephone, A. Graham Bell, had preferred the English nautical term ‘ahoy ahoy’ to attract attention, according to his assistant Thomas Watson.
Other languages have picked up forms of ‘hello’ as their telephone greeting — including ሀሎ (halo) in Amharic, Hallo in Danish and Estonian and Halo in Indonesian.
French picked up the word but dropped the ‘h’ giving “Allô?”, which has also flowed through to alo in Romanian and Turkish, to ألو (Allo) in Arabic to алло́ (alló) in Russian.
Most languages also have words for answering the telephone that are different from regular greetings. If you don’t say алло in Russian, you might instead say слу́шаю (slúšaju), meaning “I am listening”. In Italian, the telephone is answered with “Pronto?” — from the Latin prōmptus — indicating that you are ready.
The Korean telephone greeting 여보세요 (Yeoboseyo) comes from “여기” (yeogi) meaning “here,” “보다” (boda) which is the base form of the verb meaning “to look” or “to see,” and “세요” (seyo), a polite ending used in formal speech. Together, these parts form a phrase that can be translated literally as “look here.” This combination underscores the attention-getting nature of the phrase when used in telephone conversations. It’s akin to asking for the listener’s attention, but it’s specifically used for answering phone calls and not in other contexts.
The Japanese greeting もしもし (moshi moshi) — a reduplication of the verb 申す (mōsu, “to speak”), literally means ‘speaking speaking’ — like ‘testing-testing’ in an audio sound-check, is also a special word that is only used on the telephone.
Chinese is even sparser — a Chinese telephone call is answered with the rising-tone “喂” (Wéi), which means not just more than the sound itself — and not used outside of the telephone context.
If you like this article, please check out the ‘hello language’ telephone case on etsy, as well as my other language-related designs.
Or more sinister…
