 Hello, have you ever asked yourself why the word for mother often seems to be either mama or nana? And what about the word for father, which often seems to be either papa, baba or something like dadda? Surprisingly, these similarities hold across languages and even across language families. In the Indo-European languages, we have forms such as mama or papa in French, similar forms in English and German, and even in the Celtic languages, for example in Welsh, we have forms such as mum and dad. And the facts are the same for other languages. Swahili has mama and baba. In the Philippines, Tagalog has nanae and tatai. Fijian has nana and tata, Mandarin, so intimidatingly different from English to the learner, offers mama and baba. And Chechen in the Caucasus, well, nana and da. And even native American languages, Eskimo, for example, has anana and atata. Quasati, spoken in Louisiana and Texas, turns out to have mama and tata, and down further in El Salvador, Pipil has nana and tata. It's tempting to assume this means that the first humans called their parents mama and dadda, and those two warm, hearty words have survived and remain in use today. But the notion is too good to be true. Without time in language, sound changes create new words and new meanings, so stability is not the issue here, but phonetics surely is. Looking at the sound structure of the words in question here, we find they all exhibit the low central vowel a, a vowel that can be produced almost without any articulatory effort. The tongue lies flat in the mouth, and the lips are in a neutral position, a. Unsurprisingly, it's among the first sounds in infant speech, as pointed out by the pioneering linguist Roman Jacobsen. And how can we break up the stream of a? Well simply by closing our lips, a. The result is either am, or at a later stage, a. Babies do this to nurse. Anatomically, m is even simpler than p, since the velum does not have to be raised, it can simply remain in its rest position. So the first sounds baby produce are sequences of maas, and later paas. Thus, the order in which babies learn to make sounds explains why the next closest usual caretaker to mum is so often called papa or baba. And the syllable structure? Mama and papa exhibit open syllables, that is, syllables with no coda. Any explanation for that preference? Well, all languages of open syllables, but not all of them have close syllables, that is, syllables with a coda. For this reason, and for reasons of ease of articulation, open syllables are more likely to occur first. And how did this open syllable bubbling turn into words? Well, babies speaking this way are just playing, but adults don't hear them that way. A baby bubbles mama, and it sounds as if he's addressing someone, and the person he's most likely addressing so early on is his mother. The mother takes mama as meaning her, and in speaking to the child refers to herself as mama. So mama now means mother. That's most likely what happened with the first humans, but more to the point it happens with baby humans worldwide today, whatever language they're speaking. That means that even as the first language was becoming countless others, this mama mistake resulted in mama becoming the word for mum, time and time again, regardless of what was going on with all the other words. So ma must have been among the first words, and it still is. Thanks for your attention.