That would probably be the case for Indo-European languages, but it's way too easy to find counterexamples from outside of those languages. In Japanese it's "iie" (いいえ), in Finnish it's "ei", and the latter shares roots with other Uralic languages which probably have something similar.
I wouldn't be surprised if a whole bunch of African or Native American languages happened to have entirely unrelated words for "no", although I don't speak those.
Even so, many of the languages have it similarly short, it either has n or o, or at least would rhyme in some way with no.
Of course there are exceptions, but all the examples in this article are dumb because they're just mostly modern words where the english version of it just gets copied. I guess I'm just more interested in the old stuff.
Fair enough. I think loan words from a single source language are really the only ones that could potentially be found to be the same in all languages, though.
There are several large language families outside of the Indo-European one that are distinct enough that it's hard to see nearly all of them actually sharing the same words except for relatively modern loan words, or possibly onomatopoeia.
It's not particularly surprising that something like "no" would be short in most languages, considering that it's a very common interjection, but that doesn't mean it's the same.
(The top examples in the article are originally from Arabic and Nahuatl, and the spread of both words is old enough that it predates the hegemony of English, and I think many languages probably got their equivalent of "chocolate" via other Indo-European languages instead. I'm not sure the other examples are actually cases of an English version being copied either. Spanish, German, French, Portuguese etc. were significant enough international languages not that many centuries ago that English probably wasn't most likely conduit for loan words that are nowadays commonly shared. It certainly wasn't the only one. Of course nowadays it tends to be a predominant one.)
