Word of the Week: Na ja

German’s most versatile verbal shrug

Is this an illustration of na ja? Well… (photo by Chayant Gonsalves; source)

Do you listen to podcasts? I don’t.

Na ja, I think I must have listened to a podcast once. Where else would I have picked up the impression that na ja is the universal filler word in unscripted German, worse than entonces in Spanish?

Wherever I did hear it, I think I must have misunderstood it at first. I was struck by the similarity in pronunciation to the English no, yeah (at conversation speed the two sound nearly identical), and given my penchant for wishing up connections between German and English colloquialisms, I thought there might be a link.

No, yeah is used in a very specific circumstance: It acknowledges someone’s interruption or contradiction, then pushes on with the conversation.¹ Like this:

“So the three of us were coming out of the theater…”

“Kevin was there, too.”

“No, yeah. So the four of us were coming out of the theater…”

And the meaning is easy to get at from the component words: no (“don’t get me wrong”), yeah (“you have a point there”).

You can find all sorts of pieces online explaining how na ja is used. Generally it’s translated as something like “welllll….”² The native speakers interviewed in this video define it by saying things like “not no and not yes” or “a mix of yes and no.”

Nes? Yo? Saybe mo? (source)

I’m tempted to say that na ja and no, yeah are mirror-images of each other, but that isn’t quite right either. Both contain an acknowledgment and a diffidence—a yes and a no, as it were—but in actual usage the symmetry is imperfect. No, yeah comes down harder on the yes; its function is to incorporate a correction into the conversation without dwelling on the mistake or omission the prompted it. It’s ego-protective and basically selfish (though in a harmless way). Na ja is more generous and less specific: a way to disagree without arguing. Meaning-wise, it tends to come down harder on the no—which is interesting, because it doesn’t literally contain any “no.”

That’s right: The no in no, yeah means “no,” but the na in na ja doesn’t mean “nein.” It means… well, the Wiktionary entry lists the English equivalents as well, so, oh, hm, huh, hey, hi. It’s related to German nun.

Not these German nuns. (source)

Nun means “now,” kind of—and if you’ve ever said “now, now” or “now then” or “any day now,” you know how diffuse that word can get. Na, nun, and now all descend, with basically unchanged meaning, from Proto-Indo-European *nu. And that’s the last I’ll say of that.

So na ja can be calqued to now yes, which makes it a little clearer. Now yes isn’t a particularly common phrase in English, but if someone said it to you, you’d know exactly what they meant. It contains its own unspoken but.

Na ja is a colloquial term, or what German dictionaries call umgangssprachlich.³ This makes tracing its history a little tricky.

Let’s start by looking at some visualized data. Eyeballing the frequency graph on DWDS (which ends at the year 2000) and a Google Ngram (with data up to 2022), we see little or no usage of na ja before the late nineteenth century. It increases over the course of the 20th century, then jumps up beginning around 2006.

These are based on textual corpora. The only way a colloquialism is likely to turn up here is a) in transcripts of real speech or b) in literary imitations of speech. A will naturally be rarer the further back we go.⁴ B might also get more common over time,⁵ but it at least remains equally feasible at all times.

So, since it’s possible we could catch a citation from fairly early in na ja’s existence, I did some combing through Google Books. I turned up examples from as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, almost always from comic plays.

The earliest solidly-dated example I found was from 1807.⁶ It’s from a play called So giebt es denn in der Welt gar keine Ruhe (So there is no peace in the world), an original comedy by Karl Koch, “a member of this stage.”⁷ I haven’t read the whole thing,⁸ but in the scene in question a servant character named Hanns uses na ja while verbally sparring with a higher-status character.

“Todt.” is short for “Todtkind.” He is not a literal dead child; this isn’t Strindberg.

You might notice that Hanns says “Nun ja” in his very next line. Nun ja is its own (very similar) kettle of cobras—and appears, for what it’s worth, in the title of a work from 1768.

1. Its inverse—yeah, no, pronounced with a drawn-out yeeeeah and a clipped no and used as a conversational shutdown—exists in media, though I’ve never encountered someone who was enough of a jerk to use it in real life.

2. The sheer number of ellipses in this post should tell you something about na ja.

3. German-speakers seem to pay more attention to this distinction than English-speakers do. Umgangssprache literally means something like “language you use when interacting with people.” Etymologically, Umgang is “going around.”

4. Indeed, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century progress of na ja seems to correspond at least roughly to the increasing availability of sound recording technology, and in the 21st century it blows up alongside social media. I’m not sure exactly how this filters down to printed books—but I imagine the coming universalization of automatic transcripts will show its own effect in time.

5. Because of, for example, changes in what’s considered fit subject matter for literature

6. There are some that look earlier than this, but upon investigation turn out to be the result of OCR errors or wrong dates in the metadata.

Or, in a few cases, writers referring to the Indian cobra as Na-ja. The creature’s modern binomial name is Naja naja, which comes from Sanskrit. If that rings a bell, it may be because you remember being killed by one of their humanoid cousins. (The water nymphs known as naiads—German Najades—are etymologically unrelated.)

7. Not to be confused with this guy

8. If you want me to read forgotten comedies for you,