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Why we are saying "uh" less and 'um' more

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Woman with her mouth open
What's in an "um"? According to experts, "uh" and "um" are somewhat different beasts.
"It does seem to be the case that 'um' generally signals a longer or more important pause than 'uh'," says Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.
At least that's what he thought.
Liberman has been studying these so-called "filled pauses" for almost a decade, and he has made a rather curious discovery.
"As Americans get older, they use 'uh' more," he says. "And at every age, men use 'uh' more than women."
If you look at "um", exactly the opposite is true. Younger people say "um" more often than older people. And no matter the age, women say "um" more than men. Nobody, not even the linguists, were expecting this result; until they studied these hesitations, they thought it was more about the amount of time a speaker hesitates than who that speaker is.
Then, late last summer, Liberman attended a conference in Groningen in the Netherlands. During a coffee break, Liberman was chatting with a small group of researchers. He brought up his finding about the age and gender differences related to "um" and "uh", which prompted the group to look for that pattern outside of American English. They scanned British and Scottish English, German, Danish, Dutch and Norwegian.

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