Mama and papa are “the best phonetic candidates” for words still in use today that were known long before Homo sapiens, according to two papers presented at the Stellenbosch conference on “Language in the Cradle” by Alain Matthey de l’Etang, Pierre J. Bancel, John D. Bengtson, and Merritt Ruhlen, hereafter referred to as the Stellenbosch Team. (Abstracts here: 1 2)
There has long been a dispute over whether these common words, among the first spoken by infants around the world, are ordinary words or whether they have some special source. It is often suggested, for example, that the word mama is a natural association made by forming the sucking motion of the lips. Linguists generally consider the notion of a linkage between sound and meaning to be heresy, but the near universality of certain basic words like papa and mama argue that there must be some special reason for their form. (A web page that looks at many examples of these words is here.)
One energetic dissenter from the notion that words are arbitrary is Robin Allott who maintains a website devoted to the proposition that “the forms of individual words are not arbitrary but directly derived from the form and related to the meaning of the words.” (Here) But most linguists believe word meanings reflect historical patterns rather than biological or metaphysical imperatives. The Stellenbosch team reflected the strongest version of this viewpoint, seeing historical explanations for even the most fundamental words.
The Team looked at three words in particular: papa, mama, and kaka. “Kaka” is said to be a common word for “mother’s brother” (i.e., an uncle from the mother’s side) in many languages (but none that I speak). They note that even if we imagine a relationship between the mmmmm sound and sucking, there is no discernable relationship between p and fatherhood or k and maternal-unclehood. Many languages use tata instead of papa, for father, but there is no clear link between t and fatherhood either.
The Stellenbosch Team examined the kinship terms of over 1,700 languages. Their chief finding was that these basic words do vary from language family to language family, but they remain almost unchanged among descendant languages. Semitic languages tend to use ab- (e.g., Hebrew abba, Arabic abu) at the start of their word for father. Turkic languages (north central Asia) use apa or ata (Ataturk = father of the Tuks) while Dravidian languages (south central Asia) use appa. These words appear to have been stable within the language families for thousands of years.
The stability probably reflects a combination of factors. The relationships themselves are primal. While society, religion, and technology have undergone extensive changes, the parent-child relationships persist. (On the other hand, mama in many societies is not limited to the birth mother, just as a brother is not always a blood relative.)
Infant babbling is also universal. Starting at around seven or eight months, children begin making syllabic sounds, moving from coo sounds to repeating sounds like ab, ba, ki, mo etc. This behavior appears innate and is found in children who later turn out to be severely speech impaired. Babbling may not have begun in the human line as a precursor of speech (we just don't know), but it has plainly become a pathway to speech. With their babbling pattern it is easy for a child to say papa, baba, ata, abba, abu, dada or tata.
Words like these were very possibly spoken by Homo erectus infants when speech was new.
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