By Karl Smallwood
Calling our parents anything other than mom, dad or one of the many variations thereof is an almost alien concept to many (and in some cultures is considered downright rude). So why is it we refer to our parents in this way? Where did it come from and perhaps, more curiously, is there any culture that forgoes this seemingly universal nickname custom for parental figures?
The words can be traced back to the 1500s for dad and the 1800s for mom. As with so many etymologies, where these words were first uttered and by whom is a mystery. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has admitted that they have no evidence on where the word dad originated. The word mom, on the other hand, is a slightly different story and its widely believed that the word was born from the much older word mamma which itself can be traced back to the 1500s in English. This, in turn, can be traced back to Latin where mamma meant breast or teat. From this word, we also got the word mammalia and later mammal to describe animals that suckle their young.
This brings us to the amazing part- a word extremely similar to mom occurs in almost every language on Earth. We dont mean that there is a word for mom in every language; we mean that the word for mom is shockingly similar across nearly all of the most commonly spoken languages on Earth.
For example, if you wanted to address your mother in Dutch youd say Moeder, if you were to travel to Germany, on the other hand, youd call her mutter while over in Italy youd refer to her as, Madre. Now we know what youre thinking, those are all European languages. So lets mix things up a bit and list the words for mom or mother in some more, shall we say, exotic languages, from an English speakers point of view, and see if you start to notice a pattern:
- Chinese: Mãma
- Hindi: Ma
- Afrikaans: Mam
- Ancient Egyptian: Mut
- Swahili: Mama
As you can clearly see from this list, theres a very peculiar trend with mom in various languages in that its nearly universally pronounced with an m sound. If youre still not convinced or think that were perhaps cherry picking examples, heres a pretty exhaustive list of ways to say mother in a number of languages for you to peruse at your leisure. With a few exceptions, our favourite of which is the Mapunzugun Ñuke, youll note that they pretty much all employ an m and often a ma sound.
As for the word dad, while there is certainly more variation in the ways to address your man-mum in foreign languages, similar trends can be observed. For example, the word Papa is present in several languages including Russian, Hindi, Spanish and English, while slight variations on it appear in German (Papi), Icelandic (Pabbi), Swedish (Pappa) and a number of other languages across the globe. Likewise in Turkish, Greek, Swahili, Malay and several other languages the word for dad is Baba or a variation of it.
The current working theory to explain this fascinating phenomenon is that the words parents use to refer to themselves are derived from the babblings of their child during its baby-talk phase. It has been observed that babies, regardless of where in the world theyre born, naturally learn to make the same few sounds as they begin to learn to speak. It has also been noted that during the babbling stage, babies will create what is known as protowords by combining nonsensical combinations of consonants and vowels.
The really interesting part about these protowords is that theyre consistent across different cultures for reasons that arent quite clear. The words babies make in this early babbling stage tend to use the softer contestants like B, P and M, often leading to the creation of otherwise non-words like baba, papa and mama by the child in question.
Its further theorised that as these are often the first sounds babies are able to make consistently, parents came to use them to refer to themselves, which explains why words like mama, Papa, dada, tata and baba are present in so many languages as a way of addressing ones parents. Its usually less complex to say that the parents real names and works as a substitute that ultimately sticks.
As to why the ma sound in derivations like mamma came to be assigned to women instead of men, it is generally thought that it is derived from the sound babies make while suckling or feeding. Its noted that the only sound a baby can really make while its mouth is full of his or her mothers life-giving bosom is a slight nasal murmur or a repeated m sound. Further, when the baby is hungry and sees the object of its foodie desires, it is not uncommon for the baby to, as linguist Roman Jakobson put it, reproduced [it] as an anticipatory signal. While no one can prove this is how mom and its predecessor mamma came about, it would at the least explain why there is an almost universal trend of the word for mother in varying languages utilising the m, and often ma sound.
There is no such precise theory for why the word dad was specifically chosen (presumably from dada), but this lack of a good reason to assign dada to male parents over other variations like papa, tata, baba, etc. is perhaps why there is such variation on this one in terms of which repeated consonant is used to go along with the A’s in a given culture.
So is there any culture in which this nicknaming practice isnt observed? There are certainly examples of cultures that dont adhere to the idea of a nuclear family, but as far as applying similar types of nicknames to parental figures, not really At least as far as we could find and were usually very good at this sort of thing and spent more hours than we care to admit trying to find the obligatory exception. But if you happen to be an anthropologist or just someone who knows different and you know of an exception where children dont commonly give their parental figures (whether truly their biological parents or not) some sort of nickname, please do let us know. We came up empty on it, which makes us a little uncomfortable as there seemingly always is at least one exception somewhere for just about any issue. Is this an exception to the rule that there is always an exception? It would seem so.
This article was originally published at Today I Found Out.
Featured Image Courtesy: Visual Hunt