Mama and Papa

In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds /ma/, /mama/ and similar ones known to correspond to the word for "mother" and "father" in many languages of the world.

The basic kinship terms mama and papa are said to comprise a special case of false cognates. The cross-linguistic similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition. These words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies, and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry of !Kung ba, Aramaic abba, Mandarin Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "father"); or Navajo amá, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama" (all "mother").

These terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (bilabials like m, p, and b and the open vowel a). However, variants do occur: for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, the Mongolian and Turkish word is ana, and in proto-Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was *papa. The modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food".

In the Proto-Indo-European language *mater meant "mother" and *pater meant "father", *appa- meant "papa", i.e. a nursery word for "father".