Why are some words, like “mama and papa”, similar in many languages?
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I’m not well-versed on the etymology, but as a layman and fellow linguaphile, I think I figured out a pretty simple answer. From a performance aspect, one can deduce that these are two of the lowest effort words to make (“ma” literally being *the easiest* word).
Without opening your mouth, make as low effort a sound as possible. You probably hummed. From a hum, open your mouth as neutrally as possible; try not to shape your mouth or alter the sound or to produce any particular sound at all. Simply go from a closed-mouth hum to an open-mouth “hum”. You’ll notice that the hum is now a vowel closest to an U sound as in “ugly” or an A as in “all.” When your lips separated, they produced the sound of a consonant. That consonant was M. Attempting to consciously produce sound with your mouth, at virtually the lowest level of effort and recognition possible, you have said “ma.” I’d argue that “ma” is borderline universal and typically the first word because it is literally the easiest word to say. “Pa” or “ba” add only a tiny bit more effort to the same process.
I’m not learned on the subject though, so maybe I’m totally full of shit. Seems simple enough though.
/m/ and /p/ are bilabial sounds, that is, you use both of your lips to produce these sounds. An act which is learn pretty naturally (like eating) from an early age. In early attempts to talk, infants address their caretakers which sounds which comes naturally to them, hence the words are pretty similar across languages.
Apparently it has to do with the fact that M and P are two of the easiest phonemes the human mouth can produce, as well as the phonem A. That make both of those words two of the easiest sound combinations a human baby can pronounce, therefore, really common words that, being some of the first said at such an early age, can be related to parenthood.
“Mama” and “papa” are sort of a special case. There’s a big [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa) about them — it’s marked as needing more sources but does seem to accord with what I’d heard elsewhere. Basically those are easy and natural sounds for babies to make, and it’s normal for babies to have some way to refer to their parents pretty early on.
A lot of other words that are similar in many languages are similar because the languages are related to each other. Similar words which mean the same things in different languages are called [cognates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate).
For example, many words in Spanish are similar to words with the same meaning in French because both Spanish and French developed (over the course of several hundred years) from Latin. The Spanish words for “mother” and “father” are “madre” and “padre”; the French cognates for these are “mère” and “père”. The Latin words they’re derived from are “mater” and “pater”. French and Spanish and other languages which developed from Latin (Italian, Romanian, etc) are in a group called the Romance languages. English did not develop from Latin, but the words are still sort of similar because they’re in another language group (the Germanic language family) from a nearby area in Europe.
Note that there are some other reasons that words can be similar across languages. I’ll give a couple examples from English and Japanese, which are totally not related to each other.
In some cases, words are directly borrowed from another language because the other language has a really good word for a thing. These are called loanwords. For example, Japanese “beisoboru” (borrowed from English “baseball”) or “tsunami” (borrowed into English from Japanese).
Another case is onomatopoiea, which is words that describe the sound of something. For example, a cat sound is “meow” in English and ~~”niao”~~ (edit: actually ニャー, “nyaa”) in Japanese. They’re similar words because they’re trying to describe the same sound. (Edit: a better example would be English “moo” vs Japanese ムー “muu”.)
Most languages in Asia and Europe (Well more in Europe than Asia) have a common root so share similar vocabulary. This ancestral language (called Proto Indo-European) had some word like mātr for mother and pātr for father. Which is where our words for mother and father come from.
Also ma-ma or pa-pa will be one of the first sounds a baby will make thus they are often associated with parents (mother and father respectively).
A French guy did a comprehensive video on this topic. Turns out “mama” and “papa” are just the very first syllables a toddler can form, along with “baba”, in Arabic for example “baba” is used to refer to the father. These words are not a proof that all languages come from the same root, the “Babel” linguistic theory.
https://youtu.be/bxPdmEmNCaU (subtitles available)
Edit: replaced “Babylone” with “Babel” (sorry I’m tired)
Mother claimed the first sound baby makes. “ma ma ma”
Dad took second “da da ” or “ab ab abba”
simply the first sounds baby makes are emotionally claimed by caretakers.
There is a developmental aspect to this as well. Infants begin to “coo” anywhere from one to four months of age. This is expressing a single phonemic sound, like “aaa” “aaaa” etc. At about 6 months of age, with a wide variation, infants begin to “babble,” which is combining to two phonemes. So they begin to utter things like “mmaaa” “mmaaa” “Mmaaa” or “ddaaa” etc.
There is an environmental link here, also. Caregivers hear the babble and repeat it back. They say “OH! I think she just said “ma-ma!” Say it again! Say Ma Ma!” and encourage and reinforce the babbling.
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