Learn English – What does ‘nah’ mean

vocabulary

Harry was turning over the wizard coins and looking at them. He had
just thought of something that made him feel as though the happy
balloon inside him had got a puncture. "Um –– Hagrid?"
   "Mm?" said Hagrid, who was pulling on his huge boots.
"I haven't got any money –– and you heard Uncle Vernon last night …
he won't pay for me to go and learn magic."
  
"Don't worry about that," said Hagrid, standing up and scratching his
head. "D'yeh think yer parents didn't leave yeh anything?"

   "But if their house was destroyed ––"

   "They didn' keep their gold in the house, boy!
Nah, first stop fer us is Gringotts. Wizards' bank. Have a sausage, they're not bad cold –– an' I wouldn' say no teh a bit o' yer
birthday cake, neither."
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

What does ‘nah’ mean?
(If it meant ‘no’, its location would be better in the previous sentence, I think. And so I suspect it might have some other meaning, but to find nothing except ‘no’.)

Best Answer

It does indeed mean no, and this isn't even just "Hagrid-speech"; nah is a common informal way to say "no".

I'm not sure where you mean it should have been placed in the previous sentence, but I'll attempt to explain why it appears where it does.

They didn' keep their gold in the house, boy! Nah, (the) first stop fer us is Gringotts.

There's an implication there in the nah that's based on prior context."The gold isn't in the house; there's no reason to go to the house. No, that's not where we need to go; the first stop for us is Gringotts!"

Basically in this case, the nah is being used to say "No, not that thing you just said. We're doing this." Another example:

Amy: "Did you try that new Italian place on your date last night?"

Mary: "What, and completely ruin my diet? Nah, Mark took me to a sushi place instead."

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