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The sequences of sounds /ma/, /mama/ and similar ones are known to correspond to the word for "mother" in many languages of the world, often completely unrelated among themselves. Apart from Italian mamma and Spanish mamá, English has mama (or momma) as slang for "mother", and the affectionate term mum/mom (with /m/ and a vowel that varies among dialects, but is always rather low and centralized like /a/).
These languages all come from a Latin base, tracing the words mater and pater from Latin. Both Latin and Sanskrit come from wider group of Indo-European languages. The modern language of Hindi, descended from Sanskrit, has the word mata for mother.
In Mandarin Chinese, which is completely unrelated to the above, the word for mother is ma.
Ma is also the word for "mother" in Kutenai, a language isolate of southeastern British Columbia.
In Japanese, the word for one's mother is haha, which apparently derives from Old Japanese *papa (modern Japanese /h/ is often derived from old /p/ through an intermediate stage, probably the bilabial fricative /p\/). Japanese has also borrowed informal mama and papa along with the native terms.
In Thai, "mother" is me3e (long e with glottalized high-low falling tone), and "father" is pho3o (with aspirated /p_h/).
The cause for this curious crosslinguistic phenomenon is believed to be the easiness of pronunciation of the sounds involved. Studies have shown that children learning to speak master the low central vowel sound /a/ and the labial consonants (most commonly, /p/, /b/, and /m/). Almost no languages lack labial consonants, and no language lacks a mid or low centralized vowel like /a/ (Arabic has no /p/, and English has no /a/ but it has many /a/-like sounds).
It is also worth noting that in some dialects of Spanish, papa is baby-talk for "food", and buba means "hurt" (compare English boo-boo), which are (probably not by coincidence) two of the concepts that babies first learn to convey to their parents. Following the same idea, consider also English poo and pee, not to speak of baby itself (Spanish bebé), all of them showing a simple syllabic structure and bilabial consonants.
References
- Jakobson, R. (1962) Why mama and papa? In Jakobson, R. Selected Writings, Vol. I: Phonological Studies, pp. 538545. The Hague: Mouton.
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