Baby Talk

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Jed. I’m calling from Lake Owen Camp in Cable, Wisconsin.

All right. How’s it going there?

It’s going pretty good.

What’s on your mind up there?

We originally came up with the question a couple months back when Oliver, our 16-month-old son, just started using his words.

And the first sounds out of his mouth were pretty much mama and dada.

And I think it was my wife who originally said, you know, I wonder if that’s something that adults assigned or if kids essentially assigned that because the kids were making those noises anyway.

So being that there’s two parents, they each got to pick one, Mama and Dada.

So the question revolves around instinctive language.

Are there sounds that are instinctive for humans to make for certain feelings and emotions?

Well, Jed, it sounds like you’re in a similar situation to me.

I have a 16-month-old son as well.

Playdate, playdate.

And he is a talker.

He’s a talker.

You know, I’m a lexicographer.

I edit dictionaries for a living besides the show.

And my wife is a linguist who also is a dictionary editor.

And, of course, this question has come up in our house, too.

And we actually have the books that will provide the answers to this question.

That’s why I called you guys.

I can give you the short take on this because it’s a really huge subject.

Much work has been done.

And I’m going to try to summarize a lot of academia into just a few lines, okay?

Okay.

So I’ll post some links to some stuff on our website later where you can follow up for a lot more detail.

But the short version is, we don’t know.

But what’s really interesting, in almost all of the languages spoken by humans in the world,

Mama and dada, and words for mama and mother and father, began with what we call labial sounds.

These are M, B, P.

D is a little different, but it’s close.

It’s basically those sounds with the lips parted and the tongue forward on the teeth.

D, maybe on the palate.

And so throughout, I mean, and sometimes they’re reversed.

Sometimes what is Baba in one language means father, and Baba in another language means mother.

But they often refer to mother and father because these are the two most important people in a baby’s life.

So they’re going to remember these words or learn these words first.

But there’s another problem with this.

We’re saying, you know, is it hardwired in the baby’s head?

And I think that’s what you were getting at, right?

Yeah, or that maybe that originally I was thinking that that was the first few noises the baby makes

Because those are, you know, that’s how we develop our speaking.

And, you know, two adults said, oh, look, he’s calling me mama.

Oh, look, he’s calling me dada.

It’s possible. We’ll never know.

But what’s interesting is think about it a different way.

When you want to communicate to a baby,

Even one that you know doesn’t understand you and doesn’t speak,

What do you do?

You speak in baby language.

You use really simple sounds yourself, right?

And those sounds do tend to be things that are just issuing air through the lips

And the lips making like a motorboat sound or humming.

These very simple, nothing that’s happening with your tongue in the back of your throat,

No complicated kind of acrobatics in there at all.

And so maybe it’s possible that it was the other way,

And the parents originally, by using baby talk, suggested to the kid certain sounds.

And it could work either way.

It’s kind of a chicken and an egg problem.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Jed, this is great.

This is good.

And by all means, check out the site in a few days.

I’ll post some stuff online, and maybe we’ll continue the conversation there.

We’ll talk.

I’m sure everyone has stories about the remarkable learning abilities of children.

It’s just really amazing how quickly and how well they can learn.

Yeah, when I bring it up to other parents, they say the same thing.

Great. Thank you so much for calling, Jed.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

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