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A friend just wrote this as a comment on a photo of mine on Facebook.

Is it an actual word or is it what I call a "vocal noise"?

By "vocal noise" I mean those things which convey some meaning but they're not
really lexical and can't be used like regular words. Examples in English
include "shhh", "zzz", and "tsk tsk".
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2011-06-15T13:15:24.370
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words sound-symbolism phonotactics
Is "あらら" (arara) a word or just a "vocal noise"?
According to this: <http://kotobank.jp/word/%E3%81%82%E3%82%89%E3%82%89>

It is a word that is used when you are surprised or astonished.

Perhaps like the English "woah"?
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2011-06-15T13:32:00.467
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The only real difference between what you call vocal noises and regular
interjections (such as "Well well", "Wow!" or "Ouch!") is that these vocal
noises do not fit into the phonology of their language, usually for one of two
reasons:

  1. They use sounds that are not inside the [phoneme](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme) inventory of the language, such as "tsk tsk" which is actually a [dental click](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_click) (a sound that exists as a perfectly normal phoneme in many of the native languages of Southern Africa, but not English).

  2. They use existing phonemes, but combine them in normally unacceptable ways (in linguistic terms: in ways that are incompatible with the language's [phonotactics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics)). The English "shh" use the perfectly normal English phoneme /ʃ/, but it used irregularly, since English doesn't normally allow words composed of consonants alone, without any vowels, and also since the consonants /ʃ/ is usually very prolonged.

If we choose to use this criterion to distinguish between "regular"
interjections and "vocal noise" interjections, then あらら is definitely a
regular interjection: it's a completely normal word as far as its phonology
goes: it doesn't have any strange sounds or phoneme configurations. It's
really not different than the English "Wow". It's probably an
[onomatopoeia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia) if that's what you
mean, but for the record so is わんわん, どきどき、旗 (originally: `[pata]`, cf. ぱたぱた,
the modern onomatopoeia for flapping) and probably even 光 (originally:
`[pikari]`, cf. ぴかぴか, the modern onomatopoeia for shining things).
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2011-06-15T14:31:57.193
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A few friends of mine say it quite often, to express some kind of slight
compassion. If someone said "I have to work on Sunday", they would say "arara,
what a pity" (あらら、大変です) in return. I would consider it a real
word/interjection.
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2011-06-16T09:39:32.500
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