You say hullo, But I say hello.

This is another problem sent to me from the real world by a troubled correspondent.  It turns out to be an interesting story but I will tell you now, because I know you are wondering.  It is ‘you say hello, I say goodbye’. The Beatles are in the hello camp.

 In the 1500s the English borrowed holla from the French as the noise to make when you wanted to attract someone’s attention.  This comes from the French exclamation holà  (ho là meaning ‘ho there’).  Just as a side note there was a similar form in Old High German hollo from the verb holon meaning ‘to fetch’, used in the imperative form specifically to summon a ferryman. This hollo also entered English and may have influenced developments.

 Hallo drifted into the form hallo or halloo, still with the same function of attracting attention.  Because the stress was on the second syllable, the first syllable was understandably slippery, so hallo turned into hullo and then into hello.

 In the early 1800s the British started using hello and hullo as a form of greeting. It was toned down from the shout to get attention to a polite noise which acknowledged another person’s presence.  

 Google Ngram is a particular kind of search which Google has developed to run on Google books. It can show you the frequency of a word from 1800 to the present day.  It is broad brush but useful for getting a general idea of usage. On the question of hello and hullo it says that hullo was low frequency in the early 1800s, rose steadily to high frequency in the 1930s, dipped a bit after that but rose again from 2000 on.  By contrast hello remained pretty low frequency until the 1980s and then surged.  There has been a greater decline in the use of hullo in British English than in American English.

 A search on hello on the internet restricted to Australian sites reveals that hello has huge frequency and hullo has very minor frequency.  So a hullo user in Australia can expect to be the odd one out on this variation. This is not to say that hullo is wrong.  It is a legitimate variant but not one that is popular here.