In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds /ma/, /mama/ and similar ones known to correspond to the word for "mother" and "father" in many languages of the world.
The basic kinship terms mama and papa are said to comprise a special case of false cognates. The cross-linguistic similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition.[1] These words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies, and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry of !Kung ba, Aramaic abba, Mandarin Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "father") ; or Navajo amá, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama" (all "mother").
These terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (bilabials like m, p, and b and the open vowel a). However, variants do occur; for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, in Altaic and Turkish we have ana, and in proto-Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was *papa. The modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food".[2]
In the Proto-Indo-European language *mater meant "mother" and *pater meant "father", *appa- meant "papa", i.e. a nursery word for "father".
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'Mother' in different languages:
which tend to use open vowels such as [ɑ] and [ɐ].
In Russian papa, deda and baba mean "father", "grandfather" and "grandmother" respectively, though the last two can represent baby-talk (baba is also a slang word for "woman", and a folk word for a married woman with a child born). What makes the most sense is the breakdown of the word maternal and paternal. Maternal meaning from the mother or (Ma) and Paternal from the father or (Pa).
Dravidian languages like:
all have the words amma and appa.
Though amma and appa are used in Tulu, they are not really Tulu words but used due to the influence of Kannada. The actual words for mother and father in Tulu are appe pronounced IPA: [ape] and amme pronounced IPA: [amæ]. It is probably the only language where the m and p sounds are reversed when addressing mother and father.
In Telugu "amma" and "nanna" are used for mother and father respectively. 'aam aam' is for food and 'appa' for snacks in baby language.
Malayalam also uses acha for father. The terms papa and mama are used for baby food and breast milk respectively in this language.
In Tamil "Thaai" and "Thanthai" are original Tamil words for mother and father, Amma and Appa came in later due to external influence.
Almost no languages lack labial consonants, and no language lacks an open vowel like [a]. The Tagalog -na-/-ta- mom/dad words parallel the more common ma/pa in nasality/orality of the consonants and identity of place of articulation. However, there is nothing of motherhood or fatherhood inherent in the sounds.