Backchannel responses: what “mm” and “ok” become in a chat
Victor Yngve named the back channel in 1970: the “mm” and “yeah” a listener gives without taking the turn. In a chat each of those signals becomes a message.
Backchannel responses are the short signals a listener gives while someone else is talking, such as “mm”, “yeah” or “okay”. The term goes back to Victor Yngve in 1970. In speech these signals run alongside the speaker’s turn; in a typed chat each one has to be sent as a message of its own.
Most of the listening in a spoken conversation is audible and almost free. A typed conversation has no place to put it except the same column as everything else, which changes what those small signals look like on the record.
Yngve’s two channels: one person talks, the other signals
The idea comes from a 1970 paper by Victor Yngve, “On getting a word in edgewise”, given at the sixth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Jenny Yau-ni Wan’s 2018 study in the Journal of Intercultural Communication summarises it this way: the term back channel implies that two channels in a conversation operate at the same time. The main channel carries what the person holding the floor is saying. The back channel is where the listener gives information without claiming the turn.
Wan notes that Yngve did not limit the back channel to items such as “yes” and “uh huh”. He included short comments and short questions, as long as the listener was not taking over. Later writers moved the boundary; Wan notes that Duncan and Fiske, drawing on Yngve, extended the term to sentence completions, requests for clarification and brief statements. What they share is the position: a backchannel happens inside someone else’s turn and leaves that turn with them.
The other names in the literature say the same thing from different angles. Marlene Böttcher and Martina Rossi, writing in Frontiers in Communication in 2025, list “listener feedback”, “minimal responses” and “acknowledgment tokens” as labels for the same thing, and define the backchannel as a response produced during the current speaker’s turn to show active listening without interrupting.
What a spoken backchannel looks like when someone measures it
Valéria Krepsz and colleagues, in a 2022 corpus study published in Linguistica Silesiana, analysed backchannels in 10 Hungarian conversations. Four forms made up a little more than 80 per cent of everything they found: a hummed “ühüm” at 34.4 per cent, laughter at 24.1 per cent, “igen” (yes) at 11.7 per cent and “aha” at 10.5 per cent. Most responses, 87.7 per cent, were a single item rather than a phrase.
They are also very short. In the same corpus a hum lasted 273 milliseconds on average and a backchannel “igen” 349 milliseconds. On average each speaker produced 27 of them per conversation, with wide variation between conversations. The study is narrow: 10 Hungarian conversations, recorded with fieldworkers taking part.
Krepsz and colleagues also cite an earlier analysis of 1,155 American English conversations in which 19 per cent of utterances were backchannels, and note that the frequency appears to depend on culture. Wan’s own study compared Hong Kong Chinese and native English speakers in conversation with each other and found that the two groups leaned on different kinds of backchannel. Neither figure transfers to a chat, but both make the same point: in speech, listening produces a steady stream of tiny, cheap signals.
The same okay, from a speaker or from a listener
A single word can do several jobs. Krepsz and colleagues cite work by Gravano and colleagues showing that context decides which function a backchannel is performing, and that a word such as “okay” can perform more than one at once.
Böttcher and Rossi pushed that further. In 39 minutes of German face to face conversation they found 634 short conversational items, of which 151 were backchannels. The rest were items the speaker used to hold the floor while planning what to say next, and the two groups shared words: “ja”, “okay” and “genau” turned up in both. What separated them was everything around the word. Two thirds of the backchannels, 66 per cent, were produced during the other person’s turn and in overlap with their speech. Backchannels came with a head movement 30 per cent of the time, almost always a nod, against 9 per cent for the speaker’s items. Duration and pitch differed too.
Put plainly: in their recordings, a listener’s “okay” and a speaker’s “okay” were the same word and sounded different, arrived at different moments and came with different movements. Those are the differences the researchers measured between the two.
In a chat, the listener has to send a message
A typed chat has one channel. There is no way to say “mm” underneath someone else’s message while they are still writing it. The listener either sends something or sends nothing, and whatever is sent appears as its own entry, in sequence, after the message it responds to.
That changes three things about the signal. It is no longer simultaneous, which was the defining feature in Yngve’s picture. It is no longer cheap, because sending “ok” takes a deliberate action where a spoken “mm” costs a fraction of a second. And it is no longer accompanied by anything: the timing inside the other person’s turn, the pitch and the nod that Böttcher and Rossi measured all fall away, leaving the bare word.
A reaction, such as a thumbs up attached to a message, is the closest a chat comes to a back channel, because it answers without adding a new line of text. How reactions appear once a chat is exported differs by platform, and this article makes no claim about it. The broader point about what a transcript keeps and loses is the subject of a separate piece on grounding in communication and what a chat keeps.
Reading a run of short replies in a written record
Picture the same kind of exchange typed. One person tells a long story across several messages, and the other person’s listening shows up as an “ok” here and a “yeah” there, each on its own line between the story’s messages. Listening that was continuous in speech becomes a handful of separate, countable turns.
Countable is where misreading starts. On the page, a short reply is the whole of the listener’s visible response, with nothing alongside it to read it against. The reasoning that makes a one word answer seem to say more than it does is set out in the piece on Grice’s maxims and what a short reply implies. The research above adds a narrower point: in speech, the same word could be told apart as listening or as holding the floor by its timing, pitch and movement, and a chat removes all three.
Wan lists up to 13 functions researchers have attributed to backchannels, from encouraging the speaker to continue, through claiming understanding, to displaying a lack of interest or a lack of understanding. A typed “ok” can be standing in for any of them, and the record does not say which. Time between messages is a separate signal again, covered in the piece on reply speed and how spoken turn taking works.
One thing visible in your own side of a conversation is how much of it consists of these short acknowledging messages, and where they cluster. One step in Portraitor’s flow, as its home page describes it, is picking the one person to analyse; that person’s messages are read while everyone else stays context. If that person is you, the messages being read are your own side of the chat. The piece on analysing your own messages explains what choosing yourself means, and Portraitor’s home page shows the full flow.
Where a transcript stops being able to tell you
Every study cited here measured speech. None of them measured text, and the figures for frequency, duration and overlap describe spoken conversation in particular languages, with particular speakers, in recorded settings. They explain what was lost when a conversation moved into typing; they do not say how often people send “ok” in a chat or what they mean by it.
The home page does not say how a one word reply is weighed against a long message in a portrait, or whether a run of short acknowledgements counts differently from a single one. That is a gap in what Portraitor publishes, and this article leaves it as a gap rather than guessing. What a chat analysis cannot settle about another person more generally is covered in the piece on what a chat analysis cannot tell you.
Short acknowledging replies are not the only small words doing work in a thread. The piece on discourse markers in chat looks at what oh, well and so do to the turn they open.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What is a backchannel response?
A backchannel response is a short signal a listener gives during someone else’s turn, such as “mm”, “yeah” or “okay”, to show attention or understanding without taking the floor. Researchers also call them listener feedback, minimal responses or acknowledgment tokens.
Who coined the term backchannel?
The term is credited to Victor Yngve, in his 1970 paper “On getting a word in edgewise” for the Chicago Linguistic Society. He described a main channel used by the speaker and a back channel over which the listener responds without claiming the turn.
Is “ok” in a text message a backchannel?
It can do the job of one, but it is not the same thing. Researchers define a spoken backchannel by its position inside the other person’s turn, and a typed “ok” can only arrive afterwards, as a message of its own, without the timing, pitch or nod that helps a listener read a spoken one.
Are backchannels the same in every language?
No. Krepsz and colleagues describe backchannel frequency as culture dependent, and Wan found that Hong Kong Chinese and native English speakers in conversation with each other relied on different kinds of backchannel.
Is laughter a backchannel?
In speech it often is. In the 2022 Hungarian corpus study by Krepsz and colleagues, laughter was the second most frequent backchannel at 24.1 per cent of occurrences, behind a hummed “ühüm”.
In speech the listener talks underneath you; in a chat the listener has to take a turn to say they are listening.
Your conversations, read the way you would read someone else’s.
Portraitor takes a chat export you already have, anonymises it in your browser, and returns a structured reading of how you come across. Identifying details are removed in your browser before anything is sent.
See how it works →- Yngve, V. (1970). On getting a word in edgewise. Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, as cited and summarised in Wan, J. Y. (2018). Functions of frequently used back channels in a corpus of intercultural conversations. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 18(1).
- Wan, J. Y. (2018). Functions of frequently used back channels in a corpus of intercultural conversations between Hong Kong Chinese and native English speakers. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 18(1).
- Krepsz, V., Horváth, V., Hámori, Á., Gyarmathy, D. and Dér, C. I. (2022). Backchannel responses in Hungarian conversations. Linguistica Silesiana, 43.
- Böttcher, M. and Rossi, M. (2025). The speaker’s “okay” vs. the listener’s “okay”. Frontiers in Communication, 10:1655049.
- Portraitor home page, the step that picks one person to analyse.