There is a word, and only one, spoken the same way in nearly every language known to humankind. That word, of course, is “mama.”

That’s me with my first baby daughter…:) I’m such a lucky mama!

“Mama” is one of the many words children use to refer to their mother. You see the same or similar word being used across various languages. When native English speaking children start talking, they start calling their mothers “mama”, “momma” or “mom”. In German, Russian, Greek, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese Romanian and Dutch mother is “mama”. In French it is “maman” and in Italian, Swedish and Norwegian it is “mamma”. Of course, pronunciation can vary a little, but they have the same sound of consecutive m’s and a’s.

What is the reason for this word to be similar across all these different languages? In linguistics “mama” and the other versions are formed with a sequence of sounds that are said to be easy to produce for children that are just beginning to babble. During language acquisition and specifically the babbling stage, children are experimenting with the different sounds they can make with their mouths and therefore produce nonsense sounds. The most convenient sounds are those that the baby can easily produce when beginning to learn a language. These simple sounds of babble are rendered when consonants with the sound /d/ or the bilabial /m/, /p/ and /b/ are followed by a simple open vowel /a/. This holds true for the words used for father, which are “papa”, “baba” or “dada.”

Here are some different words used to describe mother in Polish:

matka

mama

mamusia

mamunia

mamuś

mamuśka

mateczka

mateńka

matula

matusia

mamulka

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)