Mum or Mom

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. My name’s Catherine Lancaster. I’m from Westlake, Texas.

Well, hello, Catherine.

And I have a question for you.

All right. You’re not originally from Westlake, Texas, I bet.

No, I’m originally from New Zealand, but I’ve spent half my life in Texas.

Okay.

Okay, nice amalgam.

Yeah, interesting.

I’m like 12. No, I’m just kidding.

Well, my question today is, I was raised to say the word mom for my mother, and when I came to America, everyone said mom, and I never knew that word existed until I came to this country.

So upon looking in the dictionary, in my general concise Oxford dictionary, it had both mom being British and mom just being a noun for mother.

But in the Webster Dictionary, it just says mom. There’s no mum.

So how did we get from, or how did the Americans get from mum to mom?

Oh, sigh. If we had a 12-hour program, I don’t think I could finish talking about this topic.

But the short version is, and this is the way I almost always explain it, Catherine, is that the language forked.

That is, it took different paths.

And we inherited in North America, because the Canadians do it too, a different kind of vowel set than you inherited in New Zealand.

So you guys had the rascals and the scalawags and the blackguards, and we had the fine, upstanding merchants and businessmen and frontiersmen, right?

No, I’m kidding.

I was going to say.

That’s right.

Feel free to defend yourself there, Catherine.

No, but generally what happens here with all language is that it’s carried by people.

It doesn’t transmit through the air like radio waves.

So we did get a different stock of immigrants here in the United States than you got in New Zealand.

And it doesn’t require a great deal of difference, but there was some.

We had far more immigrants from throughout Europe.

We had far more Irish immigrants here, I believe, than New Zealand did.

Our language that we speak today is directly related to the people who brought it over.

So we had more of something than you had or less of something than you had.

And thus, we say mom and you say mum.

But we really need to talk, Martha, don’t we, about all the words for mama.

Mama and ma and mama and mammy and mommy and mam and mam and mam and mam.

There’s a ton of different variants here.

And it’s no surprise that it’s different in all these different Englishes that are spoken throughout the world just because it’s such a common word, and common words do tend to do two things.

Persist, and they tend to change.

So they’re still recognizable as the thing that they used to be, but they change just a little bit, and the vowel is the easiest place for the change to take place.

Catherine, I remember feeling a similar kind of shock, almost like a splash of cold water, the first time I ran across mum and mummy in print when I was a little kid, and I was reading Mary Poppins.

I went to my mom and said, Mom, there’s a misspelled word in the book.

You know, the kids are calling their mother Mommy. What is the deal?

It’s shocking when you first see it.

Well, I remember as a child having, you know, the odd American child that would be in school and them saying the word Mom.

And, you know, at first I think I thought it was pretty cool, but then it sort of seemed to be annoying.

Oh, really?

It was a different sound entirely.

-huh.

And I guess just because I find mom to be a very deep sound and mom to be a kind of a hum sound, kind of a liltish sound, that I always kind of thought, that sounds a bit stern.

But, you know.

Like you say, it’s just from whence we come.

Mm—

Mm—

So what do you call your own mom?

Well, I call her mom, but she was a speech therapist for many years, and so, of course, it was either mom or mother.

But until I came to this country, and I have got used to it, but I just was very curious about how we got there.

Yeah, it’s an accident of history.

You might be interested to know that there are people in New England and the United States that do say mom, and actually, there are South Africans who do say mom.

Well, yes, yes. I do know South Africans that say that.

That’s right.

So there’s a difference, you know, different routes.

Like New England definitely has a different kind of historical background as far as the language that immigrants spoke than, say, the southeast of the United States.

So you would expect to be changes there.

Thank you, Catherine, so much for your call.

It’s nice to hear that cross-cultural perspective.

Well, thank you very much for answering it for me.

And now I can let other people know why we say mom and you say mom.

It’s because of the rascals and the scallowags.

Don’t forget.

That’s right.

Don’t forget them.

Okay.

Thanks for coming.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your questions about some difference between two kinds of Englishes.

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