Here’s a conversation between a young nurse and an older nurse in the BBC’s Call the Midwife which is set in the 1950s.

Nurse 1: Phyllis Crane SRN SCM.  I am expected.
Nurse 2: Oh of course.  Hello.
Nurse 1: Hmm.  When I was in training, we were always taught to say, ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, or ‘good evening’.  ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted unless we were talking to Americans perhaps.

It seems strange to us now that something as innocent as ‘hello’ could be seen as rude.  But, in the 1950s, for some people, it was.  And to understand why. we need to understand something called ‘phatic phrases’.

Now, some of you may have seen my short video on phatic phrases, but today we’re going to go in-depth on the topic.  We’re going to learn more about it.

So, phatic phrases, or phatic expressions, are kind of like small talk, phrases that don’t have any real meaning in themselves.  These phrases just have a job to do, like keeping the conversation going.

Think of the phrases ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’.  Now, if we look at these on their own, clearly the only difference is the time of day.  But actually, they serve different jobs.

So, ‘good morning’ is a way to say ‘hello’ in the morning, and ‘good night’ is a way to say ‘goodbye’ in the evening.

So, you can see that the words themselves don’t contain that much meaning but, together as a phrase, they become phatic and they have a job to do in conversation.

So, right now, you might be wondering why we even have phatic phrases in the first place when they give no real information.  But they’re important because they signpost what’s going on in a conversation.  In other words, they tell us what is happening, and they put the listener at ease.

So let’s look at another way to say ‘hello’ that you might not expect.  Here are three.

‘What’s up?’, ‘How’s it going?’, ‘Alright?’.

These are all questions that seem to be requests for information, but often, they actually aren’t.  They’re just ways to say ‘hello’.  So, here’s something you might hear from two British native speakers.

‘Alright?’.  ‘Alright?’.

/ɔːˈraɪʔ/ is the weak form of the word, ‘alright’, and in the UK, it just means ‘hello’.

But it’s all about context because sometimes you actually want to know if your friend is alright.  Okay, maybe they look sad, and you want to check in on them.  So, you can do this with your tone.  See if you can hear the difference.

‘How’s it going?’.  ‘How’s it going?’.

You can see that when I have that falling intonation, by ‘intonation’, I mean ‘stress’ or ‘pitch’.  When I have that falling intonation, I let the listener know that this is a genuine question.  I really want to know how they feel.

A couple of other English phatic phrases would include, ‘thank you’, ‘you’re welcome’, ‘no problem’, ‘nice to meet you’, ‘sorry for your loss’, and ‘have a nice day’.

When people use these phrases, they’re not thinking of each individual word.  They are thinking about the job that each phrase does for the conversation.  Of course, the list is much, much larger than that but today we’re talking about the word ‘hello’, so let’s get back to that.

When we first used ‘hello’, it wasn’t a phatic phrase.  In fact, phatic phrases are never phatic to begin with.  They just get used repeatedly over time and they become phatic later.

So, you see, ‘hello’ never used to be a greeting.  Not in the beginning.  In the 1800s, the most popular greetings would be ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, ‘good evening’, ‘good day’.  And ‘hello’ at that time was just a way of grabbing someone’s attention or expressing surprise.

(Glass smashes in the next room).  Hello!

And you might be surprised to learn that we still use ‘hello’ in this way today.

Think about when you’re on the phone and suddenly the connection drops.  You can’t hear your friend anymore.  Oh, what do you say?

You say, ‘Hello?’, ‘Hello?’, ‘Hello?’.

You’re not trying to start the conversation again.  You’re trying to get your friend’s attention.  And it’s funny that I mentioned the phone because that’s where ‘hello’ finally became a greeting.

When you answered a phone call, you didn’t know who was calling.  This is before mobile phones; this is before any kind of system to tell you who’s calling.  So, it would just be a ringing phone.  It could be anybody in the world, in any country, and most importantly, in any time zone.

So, if you’re in India and somebody’s calling from America, for example, you don’t know what time of day it is.  Is it morning?  Afternoon?  Evening?  So, suddenly ‘good morning’ doesn’t work.  You needed a new greeting.

So, two men put forward a solution.  The first man was Thomas Edison who I’m sure you’ve heard of.  He suggested the word ‘hello’.  And then Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the phone, suggested ‘ahoy’.  I’m sure you can guess which suggestion won.

Now, the thing that really spelled victory for ‘hello’ was the phone book.  You see, when we first had phones, people were a bit confused about how to use them or about the etiquette on the phone.  How do you speak on the phone that’s different to everyday conversation?

So, in the beginning, phone books had guidelines on how to speak on the phone and one early phone book suggested beginning with a firm and cheery ‘Hulloa!’, and at that point, ‘hello’ was ‘h-u-l-l-o-a’.

Another suggestion is saying ‘What is wanted?’.  And instead of ‘goodbye’ they suggested, ‘That is all’.  So even then, you can feel that some of these feel rude and some don’t.  But, at that time, they all felt the same.  ‘Hello!’ felt the same as ‘What is wanted?’, and I think that’s so interesting.

Now, of course, not everything in this phone book caught on.  But ‘hello’ did and it wasn’t long before it spread to the wider English language.

So, let’s go back to our 1950s nurses.

Nurse 1: I am expected.
Nurse 2: Oh of course.  Hello.
Nurse 1: Hmm.  When I was in training, we were always taught to say, ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, or ‘good evening’.  ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.

The older nurse didn’t feel like she was being greeted.  To her, the younger nurse was just trying to grab her attention.

Imagine someone saying, ‘Oi you!’ today.  It doesn’t feel very friendly, does it?  So, it’s not surprising that the older nurse reacted in the way that she did.

Now, in the modern world, you might think we don’t have problems like this, but you would be wrong.  We have these kinds of problems a lot, and it’s mostly to do with different generations.

For example, the word ‘hey’ to mean ‘hello’.  For a younger person, maybe younger than 35/40, ‘hey’ is just a normal way to say ‘hello’.  But, if you’re older than that, ‘hey’ might be the same as ‘Oi you!’.  It’s just another way to grab someone’s attention and it’s not really polite.  ‘Hey’ has become phatic.

The same has happened with ‘no problem’ and ‘you’re welcome’, and depending on your age, you’ll likely see one of them as phatic, and one of them as giving actual information.

To an older person, ‘you’re welcome’ is the proper response to ‘thank you’.  Somebody says, ‘thank you’, you say ‘you’re welcome’.  That’s the way we do it.

So, when they hear ‘no problem’, well, they start thinking about the details of those words.  What do they mean?  And they think to themselves, ‘Well, I didn’t think there would be a problem’.

On the other hand, for a younger person, the proper response to ‘thank you’ is ‘no problem’.  So, when a younger person hears ‘you’re welcome’ it feels a little old-fashioned and, if they think about what those words mean, it kind of feels like the older person believes they’re giving some extra special effort, even when the thing is not really difficult for them.

Another thing that can split people in this way is location.  So, ‘/ɔːˈraɪʔ/’, or ‘Alright?’ doesn’t really mean ‘hello’ in the US.  It’s actually asking if someone feels alright.  And in the UK, ‘What’s up?’ doesn’t mean ‘hello’.  Again, that’s either asking ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘How are you?’.

Things are changing a little bit, though, because in the modern world, we all share our media.  So, an American might listen to an Australian podcast, and a British person might watch an American movie.  So, these phatic phrases are getting shared and equally understood more and more as we become more globalised.  And I’m sure that you can find something similar in your own language.

So, for example, in Mandarin Chinese which is a language I’m kind of trying to study.  I’m very much a beginner but I know this much.

In Mandarin Chinese, we have the phrase ‘bié kèqì’, which means ‘you’re welcome’, and it’s used in various dialects and places where Mandarin is spoken.

In Beijing, for example, you could also say ‘bùyòng xiè’, which literally means ‘no need to say thank you’, but it is phatic so it’s just understood the same as ‘you’re welcome’.

In Taiwan, though, for some people, the phrase isn’t phatic. ‘Bùyòng xiè’ might feel like you are refusing their ‘thank you’.  It might not feel very polite.