Mama
How Could So Many World Languages Share a Baby’s First Word?
In discovering a language’s past life, historical linguists love to propose links between seemingly distant languages, like the theorized (and now discredited) Altaic language family that would link Turkish and Japanese languages. The most famous language family with proven connections is the Indo-European, ranging from Nepalese and Hindi, to Portuguese and English.
None, however, could come close to proposing the sort of universal language that would be necessary to explain the vast reach of similarity in one word: Mother.
In the photo above, I’ve compiled translations for “mother”, first in European languages, then Asian, then African. Across the world, languages that should have no relation to each other surprisingly often have similarities in two words: those for “mother” and “father”.
Why is this? As it turns out, these words are uniquely immune to the hundreds of millenia that have slowly trained our specific languages. That’s because these words are not specific to any one culture or language, but rather are born on the mouths of babies. Roman Jakobson, a Russian who was trained as a linguist in Czechia and finally taught at Harvard, first studied these earliest moments of vocalization.
He found that after cooing and crying, the baby begins to try at emulating the speech of its parents. Before any other vocabulary or grammar can be taught, the most immediate connection made is that of an identity — that is, the names for the baby’s mother and father.
Of course, the baby doesn’t know this. Nor does it know how to produce speech. It scarcely knows how to produce sounds. Therefore, the first sounds a baby develops are the easiest sounds to make: the m and the n.
These bilabial (with the lips) and alveolar (roof of the mouth behind the teeth) sounds are made with the vocal cords, and pass through the nose. Some of the qualities that made these the easiest sounds to make are:
- No determined tongue placement (as with “l”, “th”, and rolled “r”)
- No dramatic stops (as in “g”, “k”, “d”)
- No throaty sounds (more common in Arabic, Spanish, German, Greek… but English still has some, like in loch)
- No long passing of air through specific locations of the mouth, (as in “sh”, “ch”, “f”)
Everything is at the front of the mouth, near the teeth and the lips, and the air passes freely through the nose. Simple.
Now, while the parent’s sex does not require the mother to be the leading contact with the child, biology does confer more likelihood for higher initial closeness, particularly in breastfeeding (again, historically this was much less negotiable). Thus, typically the mother most experiencies the babble of her baby’s first not-even-words-but-sounds, and encourages the baby, “Yes!! Mmmmaa, Mum, Mommy!” she says. And she will lock eye-contact with the baby, still in want of communication, and will teach the first word to their child, “I am your Mommy!”
Following this are some of the next simplest sounds: “pa” and “ba”, and “da” and “ta”. The first two are still bilabial… but are slightly harder in that they are stops (the sound doesn’t glide, but rather stops suddenly). “Da” and “ta” are also stops, and are on the alveolar ridge behind the teeth as also with “na”.
Finnish, Amharic, and Telugu use “ti” sounds for mother (and Georgian actually has the typical sounds for “mother” and “father” reversed). On the whole, typically, the word for father will be made with these sounds, as in:
- Albanian: babai
- Catalan: pare
- Danish: fa
- Lithuanian: tėvas
- Hindi: pita
- Tamil: அப்பா [appā]
- Turkish: baba
- Sesotho: ntate
In English, we make use of all these sounds for family members who raise children: Mom, Dad, Father, Papa, Nana.
If you would like to read a much longer and much better version of this story, I recommend this paper, or something by John McWhorter, perhaps this podcast episode. The paper treats this topic in its first pages, and then pages 12–18 or so.
One last bonus etymology: “Mammal”.
Often while studying another language, you are brought to look more closely at your own. In class one day, my Spanish teacher was talking about mamíferos, and listing some examples of mammals. That is, “mamí”, “feros”… the second word relating to Latin, “bearing” or “bringing”. I had a sudden epiphany that our word “mammal” just means animals that have breasts. (Or, I could have paid attention in biology class, yes, I know. But that would have been both more difficult and less interesting, so…).
Etymonline.com offers the etymology of “mammal” as the Latin “mamma”, or “breast”, though Spanish sources list a more specific word, amamantar, which means to put the breast to an infant so that they may feed.
These words suggest further that the infant’s act of suckling has much to do with the name for the mother. It is the sound of the infant’s suckling, and the nasal cry for food that mimics this motion, that have conjured this association with the nasal bilabial sound, “ma-” or “na-” to the baby’s mother.
