Michael Erard wrote a book called, Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/d...=9780375423567

In a recent NPR interview, he brought up a point I had never really thought about before. That other languages have their own equivalents of our "um". For some reason I assumed that they all said "um".

The author wrote about that in a piece he did for the New York Times in 2004.
In Britain they say uh but spell it er, just as they pronounce er in butter.

The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmmm. The Japanese say eto (eh-to) and ano (ah-no), the Spanish este, and Mandarin speakers neige (NEH-guh) and jiege (JEH-guh). In Dutch and German you can say uh, um, mmm. In Swedish it's eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m and hm.
More recently, he said this on the Voice of America.
"In many languages it's a word like 'um' or 'uh,' that kind of neutral vowel. In some languages, it's 'eh' -- that's Hebrew. In French, vowels are a little rounded, so it's 'oo.' There are other languages that take a word that actually means something and they repurpose it for the filler word. So in Japanese the thinking word is 'ano,' which means 'this' or 'that.' So you'll hear people say 'ano, ano, ano.' In Spanish, it's 'este' [meaning 'this']. And it's something that people have to learn. Children have to learn it. And adults who are learning a language as a foreign language would be better off learning how to pause and delay and make the thinking sound in that language."
So are you aware of any other equivalents of "um" in other languages?