Why Babies Worldwide Say Mama and Papa

From Swahili (mama, baba) to Mandarin (mama, baba) to Basque (ama, aita), the words for mother and father look eerily alike across languages with no common ancestor. In the 1950s, anthropologist George Murdoch surveyed 470 languages and found a ma-type syllable in the word for mother 52% of the time, and a pa- or ta-type syllable in the word for father in 55%.

The explanation, set out by the great linguist Roman Jakobson in 1959, is delightfully simple: these are the easiest sounds a baby can make. When infants move from cooing to babbling, the first vowel they produce is the effortless [a] (just open and voice), and the first consonants are the labials [m], [b] and [p] — made by pressing the lips together, no tongue required.

So the universal first babble is mama, then baba and papa.

Doting parents simply claim these noises as their own names. The words aren’t inherited; each new baby reinvents them, which is why they keep recurring everywhere.