In English “goo-goo-gaa-gaa” would probably be recognized by most folks as a sort of the universal sound for a baby’s language (kinda like “meow” is what a cat says). “Cootchey-cootchey-coo” or some variation would be for the stupid sounds adults make towards a baby.
This thread has made me wonder, what does baby talk sound like - or rather how it is written - in other languages?
Twiddle
While this doesn’t address the OP at all, I think it is interesting enough to share.
When I was in graduate school, my department (Linguistics) was quite international in flavor with students from at least a dozen countries. Anyways, my first son was born between my first and second year and became somewhat of a staple in the department, in my office, etc. To a person, every one of my fellow students would talk to him in their native language when they held him or played with him. These were all people who were completely fluent in English. It was interesting enough to where I started asking people why they always did this. They all answered something along the lines of “It just feels right.”
“da-da-da-daaa-da” in Danish is how you’d say a baby talks and an adult would baby-talk to a baby. My oldest daughter actually did talk exactly like this for a few months.
The Spanish equivalent of goo-goo-ga-ga is Agugu-tata.
Have to agree with El Mariachi- I instantly revert to spanish when near a baby, or babying my kids.
agu, mi chito. or chita depending on gender
Japanese babies say “Ah-bu” (and mine did!)
There is a whole kid language that mother, (to some extent) fathers, all kindergarten teachers and even first grade teachers will use. The kids learn totally different words for some things, (for example, the baby word for “foot” is “anyo” and the adult word is “ashi”) which I thought was hard on the kids having to relearn the proper words at a later date. But my kids who started out with adult Japanese were laughed at by adults and kids simply did not understand them.
And Gaffer, I too cannot talk to babies naturally in Japanese. I am fluent, and CAN do it, even in fairly correct baby-dialect, but it just feels weird, and English comes out.
One common transliteration of “baby sounds” in French is arheu arheu. There are also words like a ga ga, or dou-dou.
To add to Hokkaido Brit’s post, in Japanese baby-talk, “s” is often replaced by a “ch” sound. For instance, desu ka becomes dechu ka.