I read in some baby magazine once upon a time that a baby’s most common first word is “Dada” because the “da” sound is easier for a baby to say than the “ma” sound.
I’m going to assume they were talking about American babies.
So what about, say, Russia? Uruguay? China? Worldwide is a baby’s first word most likely to be a parent’s name, or do maybe some countries have kids saying, oh, “milk” as their first word because it’s easier to say?
And I wonder if, overall, worldwide, if babies say the word for father sooner than the word for mother, or vice versa*?
*Assuming both parents are in the picture
I think a lot of languages have terms fairly similar in sound and meaning to ‘dada’ and ‘mama’ because they’re derived from the types of sounds young babies often make first, and noth the other way around. I’m not sure about that though.
In spanish, for example, (which I believe is the prevailing language in Uruguay,) freetranslation.com converts ‘daddy’ into ‘dada’ with an accent mark on the second a, and ‘mommy’ into ‘mami’ I thought of trying russian and simplified chinese, but realized that I wouldn’t be able to make sense of how the words sounded because those languages use different alphabets.
Really, all that’s happening with baby’s ‘first words’ is that the infant is vocalising an ‘aaaaaah’ sound and modulating it by opening and closing the mouth - ‘dadadada’, ‘mamamama’, ‘papapapa’ and ‘babababa’ (in a few middle-eastern languages, father is ‘abba’) are pretty much the same all but for minor repositioning of the tongue and tensing of the lips.
I thihnk chrisk is right - the terms were derived from the sound.
Chinese is either “ma ma” mother or “ba ba” father. I noted this in a differnt thread, and had about 20 replies of people saying “baba” is a term for a Russian Grandmother.
Anyhoo, these are the first 2 words commonly spoken in Chinese
I’ve never heard any sort of proof of this; it’s one of those things that’s repeated but I’m not sure it’s been proven. Worldwide, it sure seems to me that most languages have common names for ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ that are clearly derived from babytalk: mama and papa in English, mamá and papá in Spanish, maman and papa in French, something along those lines in Swahili (can’t recall exactly what), the previously mentioned mama and baba in Mandarin Chinese - so if indeed babies talk about dad before mom, the question is why in so many places in the world do we assign the baby’s first utterance to Dad and the second one to Mom?
Saying that “dada” is a baby’s first word, in my opinion, is stretching the definition of “word” too far. One of the first sounds a baby makes is “da”, because it’s an easy sound. And babbling babies like to repeat syllables, so it becomes “dada”, as well as “dadada”, “dadadada”, and “dadadadadadadadadada”. But it doesn’t mean anything to the baby yet. The baby has just figured out that he came equipped with this really cool vocal apparatus and he has decided to take it out for a spin.
To my mind, it doesn’t count as the first word until it means something. If a baby consistently makes the same sound to refer to a certain person, thing, or action, then it’s a word. If the baby says “dada” to Dad, Mom, Grandma, the cat, and the tube of diaper rash cream, I don’t think it counts.
For what it’s worth, the babies I’ve known have almost all said “mamma” as their first word, soon followed by “dada” or “pappa” or something similar. (One of our sons had trouble saying /p/ and said “mamma” to mean both mamma and pappa. Very frustrating for the little guy!) After that? Well, “car” and “shoe” seem to be pretty popular, but I haven’t noticed any other patterns.
My first word was apparently “kaas” which is Dutch for “cheese.” My (American) parents were living in Holland when I was born, and for my first year and a half of life. My mother says this, at any rate.
My father says my first words were, in reply to someone saying “aw, iddn’t he a cute little baby?”:
"it’s ‘isn’t he’ "
I have a reputation for being a stickler for grammar and pronunciation.
Babies do come out with “mama”, “papa”, “baba” and so forth fairly early on. Their parents respond with delight, which encourages baby to repeat the sounds. At some point the sounds acquire meaning for the baby - a meaning suggested by the parents reactions - but this is probably well after the baby has learned to speak the sounds at will, and it’s probably not easy to say exactly when they acquire meaning.
Why is the first-uttered sound more usually assigned to the father than the mother? Well, it’s a speculation on my part, but babies are so intimately bound up with their mothers that the consciousness that the mother is a separate person, rather than an extension of the baby itself, may develop later than the consciousness that the father is a separate person. Hence the baby experiences a need for a word for “father” before the need for a word for “mother”.
For the record, apart from mama, baba, dada and so forth, the first word which my daughter used correctly from the outset was “hat”.
I was fairly odd as a baby, since my first word wasn’t one of the standard ones. No “mama” or “dada” for me. No, my first word was “bird”. Which is odd, since I can’t recall ever being overly fond of birds.
Another oddity (and a slight hijack): my first complete sentence. You’d expect a simple, two-word phrase to be a kid’s first sentence, wouldn’t you? Something like, “That’s funny,” or maybe, “I’m hungry”? Not me. I’ve been told that, in response to some request that I found unacceptable (I think it was hugging some obscure relative or something) I responded with “I’m not gonna do dat.”
I have to wonder, though, was I really that precocious as a child? Or maybe I just didn’t see the need to form complete sentences when single-word utterances were serving me just as well. At least, they were until I was presented with a situation where a simple “no” wouldn’t convey the depths of my determination to never hug that relative.
