Hop(p)la in French and German

Abstract

There is a growing body of conversation analytic research on the role of vocalizations and interjections in interaction. This conversation analytic article contributes to this research by comparing the use and functions of the interjection hop(p)la in French and German interaction. While hop(p)la occurs frequently in everyday French and German conversation, it has not been studied as it occurs in real time. The data come from publicly-available data repositories and from the authors’ own collections. Findings show that the use and function of hop(p)la differs from what is described in popular culture publications. In addition, there are differences in the function of hop(p)la as it is used in French and German. The paper discusses the implications of this research for language teaching, translation, and applications in AI.

1. Introduction

In line with the theme of this special issue, the present paper undertakes a cross-cultural comparison of the use and function of one particular interjection in French and German from a conversation analytic perspective. Interjections are ubiquitous in interaction and play a central role because they “streamline everyday language use” (Dingemanse, 2024, p. 257). Their important role in interaction has also been recognized by researchers involved in developing and investigating the language output of chatbots (Sheehan et al., 2024). Here, they are said to specifically serve to “increase anthropomorphic perceptions of chatbots” (Sheehan et al., 2024, p. 892). Interjections occur in all languages (Dingemanse, 2024) and, at times, the same linguistic form occurs across languages. In some cases, the same form also has similar functions across languages. This is the case with huh?, which can function as a repair initiator in a variety of languages. However, while oh occurs in both English and German, there are language-specific nuances in its use: although in English oh functions as a marker of a cognitive change of state, in German it functions as a marker of affective changes of state, while a different interjection (ach) is used to signal cognitive changes of state (A. Golato, 2012a). These nuances in use are of interest not only from a linguistic perspective, but also because they have implications for second language learning and teaching, translation studies, and human–computer interaction. This paper contributes to our knowledge of the use of interjections across languages by exploring the use and function of the interjection hop(p)la in French and German. We first review the literature on interjections in general. We then discuss prior research on hop(p)la and analyze data samples from everyday and institutional interaction in both French and German.

2. Literature Review

Traditionally overlooked in linguistic research (Ameka, 1992; James, 1974), interjections have become a subject of increasing scholarly attention since the pragmatic turn in linguistics. These expressions, which function as standalone utterances which do not integrate into syntactic structures (Ameka, 1992, p. 105), include a wide range of lexical and non-lexical items which serve various interactional and expressive functions (Ameka, 1992; James, 1972, 1974; Padilla Cruz, 2023). Researchers have examined interjections from multiple perspectives including their syntax (James, 1972, 1974), semantics (Ameka, 1992; Padilla Cruz, 2023; Wierzbicka, 1992; Wilkins, 1992), historical development (Dingemanse, 2024; Nübling, 2001; Padilla Cruz, 2017), and discourse roles (Meng & Schrabback, 1999; Padilla Cruz, 2023). Their connection to non-lexical vocalizations used systematically in interaction has also been recognized (Keevallik & Ogden, 2020).

Scholars distinguish between primary interjections, which are not derived from lexical material (Ameka, 1992; Nübling, 2001, 2004; Reber & Couper-Kuhlen, 2010), and secondary interjections, which originate from lexico-syntactic elements (Reber & Couper-Kuhlen, 2010, p. 72). Nübling (2004) proposes a continuum where prototypical interjections—which are spontaneous, referentially empty, syntactically independent, uninflected, and often onomatopoeic (Nübling, 2004, p. 13)—occupy the core, while other forms exist at varying distances from the core. Extending this framework, Reber and Couper-Kuhlen (2010) introduce the category of sound objects encompassing both interjections and other non-lexical vocalizations such as whistles, groans, and sniffs.

The relationship between interjections and bodily actions has been widely explored. Many interjections have deictic properties (Wilkins, 1992), frequently co-occur with gestures, and serve as a bridge between verbal and non-verbal communication (Ameka, 1992, p. 112; Eastman, 1992). Drescher (1997) suggests that interjections contribute to affektive Synchronisation, harmonizing interlocutors’ communicative styles and fostering alignment not only in affective stance but also in embodied conduct. This strong connection between vocalizations and gestures is particularly evident in cases where vocal expressions depend on physical actions (Keevallik & Ogden, 2020, p. 7), with meaning emerging through local interactive contexts and multimodal sense-making between participants.

Beyond their role in emotional and embodied expression, interjections also contribute to the organization of discourse. Research using conversation analytic methodology has demonstrated that the function of interjections and similar elements is influenced by both their prosodic characteristics and their sequential placement within a turn or interaction (Heritage & Sorjonen, 2018; Schegloff, 1995). Interjections are frequently employed as sequence-organizing devices (Reber, 2012) and often signal the conclusion of actions or conversational units (A. Golato, 2018; Haileselassie, 2015; Mondada, 2018b).

This article addresses the following research question: What are the functions that the interjection hop(p)la serves in French and German in naturally occurring interaction?

3. Materials and Methods

The study is conducted within the methodological framework of conversation analysis (CA). CA takes a qualitative, empirical approach to studying talk-in-interaction, viewing conversation as the primordial site of social action (Schegloff, 1996). In other words, CA researchers maintain that everyday activities (teaching, working, playing, etc.) are accomplished through talk (Drew & Heritage, 2006). Moreover, accomplishing everyday activities is seen as involving negotiating identities, relationships, and mutual understanding—and this negotiation is always accomplished in coordination with others. CA examines interaction in order to uncover the practices and patterns of talk through which actions are achieved. In doing so, CA researchers analyze utterances within their interactional contexts through the close study of audio- and video-taped naturally occurring interactions, focusing on how participants interpret and respond to each other’s actions. This analytical framework and the data which it relies on are thus ideally suited for the study of the role and function of a given linguistic expression in conversation, as they rely on actual language use in naturally occurring settings. For introductions to the framework, see Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), Liddicoat (2007), Schegloff (2007), and Sidnell (2010). Data come from the Folk corpus in the Datenbank für gesprochenes Deutsch, which contains approximately 389 hours of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring German interactions from a variety of social settings, and the Corpus de Langue Parlée en Interaction, an archive containing 67 hours of spoken interaction recorded in different settings. In order to access these data, researchers have to create a profile at the respective sites. After logging in, a token search for ‘hopla’ will lead to the data samples used in the analysis. Note that the standard spelling in French is hopla, while the standard spelling in German is hoppla. These are the orthographic conventions we adopted for this paper. However, the French and German data will also include orthographic variants such as hoppla, hopela, oppela, hopsa, hop là and obbela. After variants were separately analyzed and it was determined that they followed the same patterns of use identified for hopla and hoppla, all variants were included in the overall analysis. The data from the two archives were supplemented by the authors’ collections of approximately 20 hours of German and seven hours of French data. These latter data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions. The authors’ data were collected with approval from the institutional review board at the authors’ university. Given the difference in size of the different corpora, there were obviously differences in the number of hop(p)la available for analysis in German and French. Specifically, we analyzed 33 examples in German and 27 examples in French. The data were transcribed using conversation analytic transcription conventions for talk (as described in Atkinson and Heritage (1984, pp. ix–xvi)) and for embodied interaction as described in Mondada (2018a).

4. Results

4.1. Hopla in French

The interjection hopla lacks a standard entry in most dictionaries of the French language. However, the entry for hop in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (9th ed, http://www.dictionnaire-academie.fr/article/A9H0920, accessed on 15 February 2025) makes reference to a regional dictionary (Rézeau, 2001: mobile version) which explains that hopla is used in Alsatian French. According to this entry, speakers use hopla to indicate that an action was carried out with ease and/or speed, and that it is also used to draw attention to something or to express joy. In addition, various popular culture publications claim that it is used in a variety of contexts typically to draw attention to an action, signify here/there you go, serve as a cautionary signal, imply oops, or function as a disarmer in instances of accidental physical contact (Daddi, 2019; French word of the day: Hopla!, 2020). These usages bear resemblance to Goffman (1978) description of the English interjection oops, which signifies an acknowledgment of a minor and unintended mishap.

In addition, P. Golato & Golato (n.d.) have investigated the use and function of hopla in a French cooking show. They have found that hopla is used after someone has successfully overcome a potential difficulty, such as accessing a utensil, avoiding minor mishaps, or managing personal space during a task. Unlike oops in English (Goffman, 1978) that indicates something went wrong, French hopla is used when the speaker has accomplished a physical action while (with seeming dexterity, from an analyst’s perspective) avoiding a potential mishap. They further argue that the hopla serves as a way to manage TV personality/audience interactions.

French cooking shows are a very specific interactional environment with a restricted participation framework. The question which then arises is whether hopla is restricted to these functions within particular interactional environments. As the data analysis for the current paper shows, hopla can also be used in other interactional settings for the same purpose: This can be seen in the following segment which takes place at a point-of-sale counter in a bakery in France. The interactants include a bakery salesperson (ve1), two customers, one of whom (c29) is speaking with the salesperson (the other customer, who does not interact with the other coparticipants, is standing behind and to the left of the one speaking with the salesperson), and the speaking customer’s preschool-aged son who is standing on a shelf positioned below the height of the counter and slightly forward and to the left of the speaking customer. The salesperson and customer are discussing the salesperson’s having left a position in which she had had more frequent interactions of longer duration with clients.

After noting that her interactions with bakery customers are different (lines 1–7), the salesperson positively assesses her current profession (line 10). The customer’s turns to this point consist of continuers (line 2 and 4) and agreements (lines 8 and 11). As the salesperson produces a sequence-closing agreement token in third position, the customer turns and looks to her left (line 12). The salesperson then qualifies her initial positive assessment of her current profession (lines 13–15). As this turn begins, the customer looks right at the salesperson, squats down slightly to lift her preschool-aged child off the shelf he had been standing on, and sets him gently on the floor as the salesperson qualifies her assessment together with some laughter (line 15). In overlap with this qualification, the customer stands back up just prior to uttering an agreement, then turns right to face the counter, looks down at her purse which is on the shelf that the child had been standing on, and then grasps the purse’s straps (line 16). In a single deft maneuver, the customer slips her left hand through the purse’s left strap while also slipping the purse’s right strap onto her left wrist, then lifts the purse off the shelf with her left arm. As she begins lifting the purse, she utters hopla (line 18), after which she immediately reaches with both hands to grasp a flyer on the counter in front of her. After some unintelligible talk from the customer, the salesperson then asks her how another of her children (not present) is doing. The timing of the customer’s production of hopla suggests that, as with the other examples in our collection, it appears to be marking the customer’s having successfully navigated a potentially difficult situation, specifically her having managed to secure and lift her purse such that both of her hands were free to grasp a different object of interest (here, the flyer).

In sum, in French interaction we see that hopla’s use is different from what popular culture publications state in that it does not mark the ease with which something was accomplished. Likewise, it does not simply call attention to the accomplishment, nor does it indicate an unintended mishap. Rather, in both cooking shows and in other settings it indicates that the interactants have successfully overcome an unexpectedly difficult situation. In all instances, interactants have been manipulating objects in the material world when uttering a hopla. This is thus a case of what Traverso (2008, p. 39) calls verbalité cogestuelle/‘co-gestural verbality.’ The hopla is uttered not when the difficult situation is first noticed, but instead when it has been resolved. In the context of a cooking show, P. Golato & Golato (n.d.) have noted that the interjection hopla serves a para-social function which the TV personalities use to help create a relationship with the audience. Here, and also in everyday interaction, the hopla also serves to mitigate a potentially embarrassing situation. Thus, hopla might be associated with face-related work (Brown & Levinson, 1987). In instances when a mishap does indeed happen and could not be avoided, interactants in our dataset seem to utter other interjections, such as tiens or oh là là.

4.2. Hoppla in German

As mentioned above, there is a substantial amount of prior research on German interjections. However, the interjection hoppla is only mentioned in passing where its function is described as indicating a speaker’s surprise (Nübling, 2004). In contrast, dictionaries ascribe different functions to hoppla. For instance, the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache notes that it is uttered in conjunction with mishaps such as when someone stumbles or something falls to the ground (“hoppla”, in: DWDS). In contrast, Duden (1999) describes it as an expression used when speakers need to temporarily stop an ongoing activity in order to make an announcement or to alert someone, such as in hoppla, da ist eine Stufe/‘hoppla, there is a step there.’

When examining actual instances in our data of how hoppla is used in interaction, however, a far more nuanced picture emerges than what is described in the existing literature. Essentially, there are two main environments and functions of hoppla. Both environments/functions are related to something unexpected having happened. First, as mentioned in the literature cited above, hoppla can be used as a response cry indicating surprise. However, our data (see below) show that when it is used in this way, it is uttered by an interactant who is expressing their surprise about something that they had said or done, or by interactants reflecting upon hypothetical scenarios. Second, we also show below that hoppla is produced in environments of near- or actual mishaps when interacting with the material world. In this latter environment/function, hoppla serves to downplay both potential and actual mishaps. We saw earlier that in French, hopla was produced when an interactant had actively taken action to confront a difficult situation and overcome it. In German, by contrast, hoppla is produced when an interactant is encountering a difficult situation which they typically have not taken active steps to confront and overcome. Interactants further orient to the situation as one which could have turned out worse or otherwise, as if what had happened was not so bad, or they merely utter hoppla without reacting further to what had happened. Hoppla thus marks that an unexpected event/difficulty has occurred but that it (fortuitously) turns out to be of minor consequence.

4.2.1. Surprise

There were a total of six instances of hoppla in German which indicated surprise. Two of these data segments indicated pleased surprise in the sense that something positive either had happened, or could potentially happen. In one, a coparticipant uttered a hoppla in response to another coparticipant having rolled a die during a boardgame which allowed them to advance in the game. The other instance is shown in the data segment below. Here, a human resources consultant speaking with a client has suggested that the client include photos in their dossier of past accomplishments, and then proceeds to provide an account for this suggestion.

Prior to this transcript, the human resources consultant had suggested that the client include pictures in his application dossier. This suggestion had received a hesitant response from the client, who stated that he was not sure he had any pictures and that if he had any at all, they would not be digital copies. In response, the human resources consultant provides an additional account for the suggestion, stating that this would be a way to make one’s application stand out (lines 1–6). As part of this account, he includes hypothetical discourse to back and illustrate this claim (A. Golato, 2012b) by enacting the reaction of a hiring manager when seeing an image in a stack of applications which otherwise, contained text-only documents (line 6). In this hypothetical discourse, the manager would react to the unexpected inclusion of pictures with a ho:ppla to mark his/her (positive) surprise. In this example and in the other one (not depicted) in which a hoppla indicates the speaker’s positive reaction to something unexpected, the first syllable of hoppla is lengthened and is also produced with relatively greater amplitude.

In four other examples in the collection, speakers encounter something unexpected which was not associated with a positive reaction. In the majority of these examples, speakers report on having had an unexpected realization. The following is a case in point. Ulla is talking about the fact that she has selected the topic of religion as a test subject for the Abitur (the high school exit exam in Germany). Prior to the beginning of this transcript, she had told her interlocutor that most people laugh at first when they hear that she selected this subject due to their understanding of it as an easy subject matter known for ethical platitudes. She contrasts such views with her current experience:

In contrast to previous religion courses, Ulla describes the content of her current course as highly theoretical, that is, as a class which makes her think and question her beliefs (lines 1–3). In order to support this claim, she then provides hypothetical speech to illustrate what she might be thinking in class (A. Golato, 2012b). This hypothetical speech contains the interjection hoppla, likely to indicate that the course presented her with unexpected information that she now needs to grapple with. That this scenario is not necessarily viewed as a positive becomes clear in her lexical choices (e.g., line 2, grübeln/‘ponder’ and line 09, zwiespalt/‘dilemma’). Of note here is that the majority of instances in which hoppla is used to indicate surprise (whether it be positive or negative) are cast as indirect or hypothetical speech. This is in line with other research which has shown that response cries often precede direct or hypothetical discourse and serve as a means for the interlocutor to communicate their affective stance on what is quoted (for a summary of the relevant literature, see Fiedler (2024)). In addition, the majority of them are in response to prior talk or information and not to the interactant’s direct manipulation of elements in the material world.

When speakers do produce a hoppla while they are manipulating objects in the material world, they are always reacting to (unexpected) mishaps which occurred, or which were narrowly averted. As we will see below, the primary function of hoppla in these instances does not seem to mark surprise, but instead to indicate that the mishap which (nearly) happened is of minor consequence.

4.2.2. Unexpected Events of Minor Consequences

In this example, a mother (Renate) and daughter (Cara) are in the kitchen as the daughter is baking a dish from an American recipe while her mother is looking on. Cara has just separated three eggs; while doing so, she has spilled some egg on the counter. We will see that Cara accidentally bumps the edge of a bowl with egg whites while she is rubbing her hands together, causing the bowl to teeter at the edge of the counter.

While Renate is asking how many eggs go into the dish and Cara is responding (lines 1–2), Cara is using a piece of paper towel to wipe the spilled egg off the counter. In line 3, Renate then checks on the progress, i.e., if all three eggs have been added, which Cara confirms in line 4. While doing so, Cara folds over the piece of paper towel with the spilled egg and presses it together, thus squeezing out some of the egg which then drips onto the floor. This action is commented on by Renate with an admonishment sa ma (sag mal)/‘hey now’. Cara first chuckles, glances at the floor, acknowledges the admonishment, and then promises to clean later (line 7). During the first part of the adjacency pair, she tosses the paper towel into the sink, while during the second pair part, she picks something off her hands and tosses it into the sink. She then briefly rubs her hands together as if trying to clean them of something. In doing so, she bumps the bowl with the egg yolks, which had been sitting at the edge of the counter, almost knocking it over. The bowl teeters on the edge and as it comes to a rest, Cara utters hoppla in line 8. In line 9, Renate comments on this potential mishap as Cara is putting both hands on the bowl, thereby further steadying it. After a brief inbreath, she chuckles and starts to provide an agreement which is then aborted, after which she then downplays the potential mishap by explaining that she has a total of ten eggs, thus indicating that she would have had more than enough eggs to redo this part of the recipe. The instance is, therefore, cast as not so dire, even if there had been a negative outcome instead of the fortuitous one which did happen. Similar to the French examples, something unexpected happened. However, while French interactants uttered hopla upon actively overcoming something unexpected, this is not the case with German hoppla: Cara does not actively prevent the bowl from falling; instead, it just so happens that the bowl does not fall and, furthermore, Cara only places her hands on it after it has come to rest. Also, Cara utters hoppla not while the bowl is moving, but again rather after it has come to rest. In other words, she produces hoppla after it is clear that a mishap did not occur. In this instance, then, the hoppla does not serve as a response cry indicating surprise, but it is still responsive to what just happened. Specifically, it indicates that there was an unexpected potential mishap and casts it as not as bad as what could have happened. Together with its placement in a slot where an assessment could have been uttered, this hoppla has an evaluative function.

In addition to these examples in which a mishap was fortuitously avoided, we also have examples in which a mishap did indeed occur. Examples include game pieces on a board game having been knocked over, a video camera being blown over by wind, food having been dropped, etc. In these instances, we still see interactants utter hopplas (or variants thereof, such as hopsa) and further orienting to the mishap with accounts as to why what happened was of little consequence. In the next example, two sisters are renovating a room. Prior to the excerpt below, they had moved a huge armoire against a wall and discussed how the other furniture in the room could be arranged. During that discussion, Tanja realizes that they forgot to remove some painter’s tape on the wall above the armoire. She suggests seeing if the tape can be removed without moving the armoire and further suggests trying to do this immediately. The so in line 1 pivots the interaction from talk to action (Barske & Golato, 2010):

In line 1, Tanja grabs and lifts the ladder to carry it over to the armoire. While doing so, she bumps the ladder into a piece of furniture (line 3), upon which she produces a hopsa (a variant of hoppla) while continuing to move with the ladder towards the other side of the room (lines 4–5). She then lifts the ladder in order to avoid other furniture (lines 6) but, in doing so, the top of the latter hits the ceiling lamp (line 7). Without stopping her movement, Tanja utters nochmal hopsa/‘hopsa again’ (line 8) and begins to set down the ladder. In overlap with Tanja’s turn and just prior to her uttering hopsa, Petra is looking up at the lamp and produces a loud audible inbreath with an open mouth (line 9), indicating her alarm. In response, Tanja explains in lines 10–14 that the lamp belongs not to her, but to a friend who did not want it when she moved since her new apartment has sloped ceilings. This serves as an account as to why it did not matter so much that she bumped the lamp. In other words, this functions to downplay the (potential) severity of the mishap. Here, then, we see hopsa being used in an environment in which an actual mishap occurred, and we also see the speaker overtly orienting to the mishap as being inconsequential. We argue that the hopsa/hoppla thus serves to mark a mishap due to clumsiness as something minor and of little importance. This is also the case in the next example, in which a family is having a roast for lunch. Johann is serving slices of meat to the other interactants. When he is attempting to give a large slice to Fred, the slice slips off his serving fork and drops back into the serving dish. Johann utters an oppala, but otherwise, neither he nor anyone else orients to his mishap. This is thus an interjection that constitutes a form of self-talk (Keevallik, 2018).

When serving the first slice of meat (lines 1–6), Johann can be seen spearing the slice of meat he is serving with the serving fork and transferring it to the coparticipant’s plate. In line six, when Johann is designating the next (and bigger) slice of meat for Fred, he does not spear the slice of meat, but instead slides the fork under it (line 7) and then lifts the fork up with the meat precariously balanced on top (line 9). At the same time, Fred is lifting his plate closer to the food. In the micropause which follows in line 10, the slice of meat falls off Johann’s fork back into the serving dish. At that point, and in overlap with Mary’s tease that Fred would like two pieces, Johann produces an oppala/‘oops’ and then spears the meat, before transferring it to Fred’s extended plate in line 13. The conversation continues with Johann producing a serious response to Mary’s tease (assuring everyone that the entire roast can be consumed), before offering the next slice to Vicky. We can see here that in contrast to the earlier example where a potential mishap (bowl with eggs falling off the counter) was averted, in this case a mishap did happen in that the meat fell off the fork. One could argue that this was only a minor mishap since the meat fell back into the serving dish (and not onto the table or floor) and could thus be served again. Of note here is that the oppala is again produced after the food has fallen off the fork and landed back in the serving dish (and not at the moment it was sliding off the fork). Here too, it marks the end of a mishap, after which the interactant quickly moves on to serve the slice again, this time remedying the action by spearing the meat instead of balancing it on top of the serving fork.

4.2.3. Summary of German Hoppla

Prior categorizations of interjections in German, which are based on introspection rather than on analysis, attribute to hoppla the function of marking both surprise and mishaps though they do not go into further detail. Our analysis has shown that it might be more accurate to say that hoppla indicates the speaker is dealing with something unexpected. Furthermore, in only a very few examples do we observe speakers uttering hoppla when something positive unexpectedly happens to them. Instead, in the majority of instances, speakers are uttering hoppla in response to either information or talk which is counter to expectation and which causes the speaker to rethink a subject matter, or to a mishap which either happened or which was narrowly averted. In these scenarios, interactants are orienting not to the unexpected nature (“surprise”) of the situation, but rather to its impact or implications. In the case of near-mishaps in particular, hoppla functions to downplay their potential severity.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

In this study, we have analyzed the interjection hop(p)la as it occurs in both French and German. As we noted in the literature review on French hopla, popular culture publications and a dictionary entry attribute a variety of functions to this interjection: It is said to draw attention to something, serve as a cautionary signal, function as a disarmer, or indicate a mishap or that something has been conducted with ease. A conversation analytic study (P. Golato & Golato, n.d.) based on empirical data demonstrated that hopla’s actual use in a cooking show is different. We show in the present paper that the findings in the previous study also hold in other settings. In all settings examined, French speakers utter hopla in scenarios in which they are facing an unexpected difficulty that they need to overcome. The hopla is uttered not at the moment that the difficulty is noticed, but instead when it has been successfully overcome. The hopla thus calls attention to the potential awkwardness of a situation while also pointing to it having been successfully navigated. It might be argued that hopla is involved in managing interactants’ face (see, e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987). Answering this question, however, is well beyond the scope of this paper and would involve using a different methodological framework.

German hoppla is said to be a marker of surprise (Nübling, 2004). The findings in this paper show that while it is true that the interactants in all instances in our data deal with something that is unexpected, the actual usage of hoppla is more nuanced than merely marking surprise. In a very small subset of the data, interactants indeed used hoppla to register their positive surprise at unexpected news or information. In all other instances, hoppla was uttered in environments in which the unexpected news was not positive but instead was thought-provoking or troubling. In these latter examples, interactants were found to be reporting on a sudden realization, with the hoppla being used as an affective response cry preceding hypothetical speech which illustrates this realization. In the majority of these latter instances, however, the coparticipants were interacting with objects in the material world (serving food, moving items, handling utensils, handling devices or game pieces, etc.) and exhibiting some form of clumsiness which resulted in a (near) mishap. Just after this (near) mishap, the person experiencing it uttered hoppla and typically oriented to the (near) mishap as inconsequential or not as bad as it could have been. This usage is thus close to what Goffman (1974) described for English oops, namely that it marks an unintended momentary lapse in competency.

We can note that the results of our empirical investigations into French and German share some features with what has been said about hop(p)la in sources such as the Dictionnaire des Régionalismes (Rézeau, 2001: mobile version). We further note that the data which informed the aforementioned dictionary were drawn not only from conversations but also were based on survey results along with textual data from a variety of types of printed material (Rézeau, 2001: mobile version). While no information seems to have been provided about the conversations, what is clear is that the dictionary’s entries reflect not only a given regional expression’s actual use in conversation, but also speakers’ intuitions about how they or others might use the regional expression in question. Previous research has demonstrated that there can be considerable differences between how an interactant believes they would use a given linguistic expression and how they actually use it in spontaneous interaction (A. Golato, 2003). Thus, it is not surprising that there are also some differences between what our conversational data reveal, and what is described in the Dictionnaire des Régionalismes (Rézeau, 2001: mobile version). Although our French conversational data indeed show that hopla speakers are carrying something out with apparent ease, our data further reveal that this occurs in situations where interactants have encountered an unexpected difficulty. This is a detail that the Dictionnaire des Régionalismes does not mention. For German, hoppla has been labeled as a marker of surprise, and as mentioned above, there are indeed scenarios where that is the case. However, in the majority of instances the function is more nuanced or complex: Interactants are using it to illustrate sudden realizations in response to others’ talk, and to downplay the severity of a situation when reacting to mishaps in their interactions with the material world.

When the same interjection occurs in two languages, one might assume that the interjection also serves the same functions in both languages. This may be even more the case when the two languages share a border, and the interjection is specifically attested in a bilingual region. The comparison between the French and German instances of hop(p)la indeed show some similarities but also some noteworthy differences. In both languages, the interjection is used when interactants are encountering something which is unexpected. However, in French, interactants use hopla to show that this unexpected and potentially difficult scenario has been successfully managed. In German, it is used to mark surprise, introduce an illustration of a sudden realization, or treat an unintended/unexpected (potential) mishap as inconsequential. In French, all examples constituted instances in which the person uttering the hoppla had been interacting with the material world i.e., they had been engaged in a nonverbal activity (e.g., manipulating an object). While in German, hoppla was also used in situations in which speakers were interacting with the material world, it was also used in response to talk, specifically as part of hypothetical speech. In all examples of the French collection, the interactants only used hopla when indicating that they themselves had overcome a difficult situation; in other words, it was never used to comment on someone else having overcome a difficulty. By contrast, the German collection included examples in which the hoppla indeed commented on an action by others.

In conclusion, the nuanced differences that we have shown between the usages of the interjection hop(p)la provide further support for what others have previously described, namely that although two languages may have the same linguistic expression, the social functions of these expressions in each language will not necessarily be identical. The findings, therefore, have implications not just for language teaching, but also for students of translation, since interjections are known to be notoriously difficult to accurately translate (Josep Cuenca, 2006; Schulze & Tabakowska, 2004). The findings can also inform work on AI chatbots because including interjections appropriately in chatbot language can help make the bots sound more human-like (Sheehan et al., 2024, p. 892).