So the foundation for the words mama and papa come from the most convenient sounds babies naturally make as they learn language. “Nursery names for mother and father, like the earliest meaningful units emerging in infant speech, are based on the polarity between the optimal consonant and optimal vowel,” writes Jakobson. Inevitably, some sounds are easier to say than others, which set them apart as a baby babbles and explores language, writes Roman Jakobson in his 1962 article (“Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’?”), which is the most comprehensible linguistic examination of the global similarities for the names of parents. The opening and closing of the mouth is the most natural order of sound production. The simplest form of babble is a consonant followed by a vowel: labial (/m/, /p/, /b/) and dental (/t/, /d/, /n/, /l/) consonants followed by a wide vowel sound (/a/) are the most dominant. What are the first sounds babies make?ĭevelopmentally, babies babble nonsense sounds to try them out. That’s why it’s so important, and why a baby’s first words are studied. Babble is the first step towards language acquisition. If you’re a linguist, baby talk is not just a cute but meaningless language used with infants. Why? Is it evidence of universal language? Is this evidence of sound symbolism at work, which is a phoneme (sound) that has meaning completely unto itself? Mother, maman, mommy, amma, mama, em, mum, mamma, mutter, mare, maty, ana … Across languages an uncanny pattern appears for the word mother.
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