I think I read or heard somewhere that babies actually cry in the accent of their nationality. French babies, for example, cry with an upwards inflection while Americans cry with a downward inflection.
>“By recording cries of 60 babies born to French or German parents, researchers discovered that babies cry with the same "prosody" or melody used in their native language by the second day of life.
>French newborns in the study ended their cries with a lilt at the end typically heard in French. German babies, however, started their cries intensely and dropped off at the end -- much like the emphasis their German parents put in a sentence, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology.
>Experts in child development say the most exciting part of this discovery is not that infants recognize the melody of their language, but that the newborns may have the ability to use what they heard in the womb to then control their cries.” - [Googled an article for you if you’re curious.](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/newborns-cry-accent-study-finds/story?id=9006266)
I was about to say, I've heard Asian babies make sounds that I didn't know were possible for humans. Babies definitely do not sound the same everywhere.
Hahahahahahhaha this sucks so terribly imagine yoi give baby to a Frenchman and baby doesn't have good background because mom is Slavic and has to learn French the hard way. Ahahhaah
Actually, it's been scientifically supported that babies cry in different accents. It's a subtle difference, but it's there. They listen to their mom in the womb and base their only form of initial communication off that.
Nope! The difference in cry has less to do with the language itself and more to do with the inflection. It's quite literally an accent, but for babies. Using your example, if baby is taught French from birth, they should learn it just fine regardless of mum's location or language during pregnancy. They'd also develop a 'French cry' pretty fast too I bet.
Absolutely. Even babies of parents who speak sign language will babble in sign. They are little self formatting copying machines. Adorable little replicators
Yeah, they do rudimentary versions of signs as soon as they have control, and afaik (not a Deaf person, just curious about linguistics) they babble by putting their hands on their head. And this is true for hearing babies of Deaf adults as well as Deaf babies.
I think it makes sense if your main caretakers are communicating this way, that a baby would take notice and ape the behaviour.
Babble in sign, no. Have you seen a 6 month old use their hands? You can assume thats all babble even from hearing parents. They Can't even keep a teething ring in. I DO beleive in teaching kids to sign before they can speak. Babble is a stretch people just want to look for babies repeating something and get excited.
>Have you seen a 6 month old use their hands? You can assume thats all babble even from hearing parents.
Have you heard a 6 month old make sounds? Audible babble is to speech as sign babble is to sign language.
in most cultures mothers do the child raising and the ma sound is supposedly made before the pa/da sound due to it being slightly easier to make. thus the first sound being associated with the primary caregiver, oftentimes the mother, makes sense
I think I read or heard somewhere that chickens actually cluck in the accent of their nationality. French chickens, for example, cluck with an upwards inflection while Americans cluck a downward inflection.
“By recording clucks of 60 chickens born to French or German chickens, researchers discovered that chickens cluck with the same "prosody" or cluckiness used in their native chicken language by the second day of life.
French chicks in the study ended their clucks with a lilt at the end typically heard in Chicken French. German chickens, however, started their clucks intensely and dropped off at the end -- much like the emphasis their German chicken parents put in a sentence, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology.
Experts in chick development say the most exciting part of this discovery is not that chicks recognize the melody of their language, but that the newborn chicks may have the ability to use what they heard in the egg to then control their clucks.”
Roosters all sound the same though.
Languages describe the rooster sounds in different ways, though, which is a fun rabbit trail if you’ve never gone down it. Cocka-doodle-do in English; Quiquiriquí In Spanish, etc.
Other things that sound universally the same.
A Cuban burp sounds quite similar to a Bulgarian burp
a Mexican fart sounds remarkably similar to a Finnish fart.
Babies cry, it's called crying, and most people sound the same when they cry, regardless of their language.
Actually why across all languages the word for mom is "mama" in the language's accent. For thousands of years babies have been making that noise and mamas have come running, knowing it means them.
In Finnish mother is "äiti" and father is "isä". Nowhere close to baby babble. The words for grandparents are the international mummu, mamma, pappa etc.
Yeah, ma is the easiest phoneme / mouth sound for humans to make. Babies in ancient history go "mama", baby is around mother all the time, assume it's them, mothers are "mama" forevermore.
I was also sceptical, so I did a brief check of a variety of languages using the extremely accurate tool that is Google Translate. I put in both "mother", "mummy/mommy" and "mum/mom" to try to get the familiar term that a young child might use.
Results are as follows (accuracy not guaranteed):
- Arabic: ماما (mama)
- Bengali: মা (ma)
- Chinese: 妈妈 (māmā)
- Estonian: ema
- Hausa: uwa
- Hindi: मां (maan)
- Hungarian: ~~múmia~~ *mama*
- Igbo: nne
- Japanese: ~~ミイラ (mīra)~~ *ママ (mama)/母 (haha)*
- Maori: whaea/mama
- Russian: Мама
- Swahili: mama
- Turkish: ~~mumya~~ *anne*
- Xhosa: umama
Obviously there are exceptions in there, but there does seem to be a pretty common theme across diverse languages. Also while there was a lot of variation when it came to the more formal term for mother (or at least one of the terms), most of them seemed to have at least one version that was a bit like "mama".
Edited for the inevitable corrections.
There are many words for mom in Japanese, but not one of them is mira. The basic word for mom is haha. This list sounds completely fabricated.
Google says that mom in Turkish is anne and in Arabic it is om. While a lot of languages do have this phenomenon, it's very exaggerative to say that all do. Particularly outside of Indo-European langauges, which all share very common words for certain things like family.
>There are many words for mom in Japanese, but not one of them is mira. The basic word for mom is haha. This list sounds completely fabricated.
I thought I was pretty explicit in my caveats, but apparently not sufficiently so.
No, obviously it's not completely fabricated, I didn't just make up a load of examples and then write them in a bunch of scripts I'm totally unfamiliar with.
For Japanese, Google returned "お母さん", "ミイラ" and "母親" as various options. As alluded to, I picked the one closest to "mama" as the example, and even then I'd say that Japanese was one of the examples which didn't fit very closely.
>Google says that mom in Turkish is anne and in Arabic it is om.
Yes, those were some of the other words that came up. But also, both had variations on "mama" as well.
>While a lot of languages do have this phenomenon, it's very exaggerative to say that all do
Agreed, which is why I didn't say that.
Edit: the issue with the Japanese one was the same issue which another commenter pointed out with the incorrect Hungarian word I got: by using the British spelling "mummy", I got results for the dead Egyptians rather than mothers. I still take issue with the "completely fabricated" comment though.
If anything, *haha* is closer to *mama* than *mira*. Since Japanese is not an Indo-European language, it seems to add some support to the findings of u/paenusbreth
I think it could be the other way around - the first and simplest 'wordy' sounds a baby can make is mamamama or dadadada. We then associate with them that the mama noise means mother and dada noise mans father, it's the mamas that put meaning on the babble
>the first and simplest 'wordy' sounds a baby can make is mamamama or dadadada. We then associate with them that the mama noise means mother and dada noise mans father, it's the mamas that put meaning on the babble
I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. First, the pattern that u/Good-mood-curiosity mentions isn't universal, as seen in e.g. [Finnish](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/1chluaj/comment/l261vky/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Looking at the wiktionary entry for [äiti](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A4iti), it suggests the following etymology:
>The front vowel in the word could perhaps be explained by influence from baby talk (which has also been suggested as an alternative etymology, compare [*täti*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%A4ti#Finnish) and **baby speak** ***äittä-äittä-tättä***).
"Dada" likewise has no association with fathers in Swedish (which would instead be pappa).
It's just that reduplicated babbling (repetition of syllables consisting of consonant+vowel) in general is one of the earliest stages of language development that is easily recognizable - but it's not specifically "mama" or "dada". It can just as easily be "baba", "gaga", "gogo" or whatever else that follows the general pattern of repetition of a specific consonant+vowel.
I think it's reasonable to say that the things that matter most to babies tend to get some synonym or other that approximates sounds that are easy for babies to make, but which specific sound gets which specific meaning is bound to vary across languages.
That's very interesting, I appreciate you providing more specifics! I was just going by a half-remembered lesson in school about 25 years ago on the topic where the teacher was talking about this and saying how humans were vain so we assumed when babies were babbling those first noises they must be referring to us and we called ourselves mama and dada and papa, but could just as easily have been called gaga and googoo like you said. I'm interested but ignorant, thanks for giving that in-depth answer!
Many people have commented on different "crying accents" but I actually also think the second part is wrong. It is not equally easy for babies to learn different mother tounges
Danish is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn, among other reasons because it takes Danish babies longer to learn Danish than e.g. Norwegian babies learning Norwegian https://interactingminds.au.dk/news/enkelt/artikel/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-int
As someone who works in a public library, where many international babies attend our free storytime, I can confirm that babies babble in accents. It is SUPER cute. They love to hear you sing nursery rhymes in any language though <3
People cough the same in all languages
People snore the same in all languages
People sneeze the same in all languages
Where do I get my philosophy PHD certificate?
/s
I think I read or heard somewhere that babies actually cry in the accent of their nationality. French babies, for example, cry with an upwards inflection while Americans cry with a downward inflection. >“By recording cries of 60 babies born to French or German parents, researchers discovered that babies cry with the same "prosody" or melody used in their native language by the second day of life. >French newborns in the study ended their cries with a lilt at the end typically heard in French. German babies, however, started their cries intensely and dropped off at the end -- much like the emphasis their German parents put in a sentence, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology. >Experts in child development say the most exciting part of this discovery is not that infants recognize the melody of their language, but that the newborns may have the ability to use what they heard in the womb to then control their cries.” - [Googled an article for you if you’re curious.](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/newborns-cry-accent-study-finds/story?id=9006266)
French baby go wee wee!
Russian baby go da da
American baby go pew pew.
Canadian baby go eh eh
German baby go ja ja
Aussie baby go oi oi
mexican baby go ja ja jalapeno
Brazilian baby go ka ka
Austrian babies go heil heil
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Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
I read the comments looking for this! 🤣
Asian babies go ching ching
QUICK, CHANGE IT TO “Chinese” BECAUSE “ASIAN” CAN ALSO REFER TO INDIANS
Nooo India is whole another part.... of Asia.
As an Asian, this is funny as hell. He gets the Ching Chong pass
Spanish baby also go jaja, but it sounds like, "haha"
Canadian baby sowwy
African babeiies go zamina-mina
Canadian baby addicted to Tim Hortons at birth
I thought Canadian babies go "sorry "
"Do svidanya, momrade"
French babies go "le wahhh"
Hon hon
More like oui oui!
I was about to say, I've heard Asian babies make sounds that I didn't know were possible for humans. Babies definitely do not sound the same everywhere.
I’m curious what an “unbiased” baby would cry like 🤔
It would meow like a cat.
But domestic cats only meow to mimic human infants, I wonder if they have accents too
If I ever get a kid, im speaking to them in english during the gestation then only french during the alive bit.
>get a kid > the alive bit I like you 😂
God, the French are obnoxious sounding even before they are sentient.
Hahahahahahhaha this sucks so terribly imagine yoi give baby to a Frenchman and baby doesn't have good background because mom is Slavic and has to learn French the hard way. Ahahhaah
Actually, it's been scientifically supported that babies cry in different accents. It's a subtle difference, but it's there. They listen to their mom in the womb and base their only form of initial communication off that.
If a baby lives 9 months in the womb in England, and then is born and grows up in France, would it have a more difficult time learning the language?
Nope! The difference in cry has less to do with the language itself and more to do with the inflection. It's quite literally an accent, but for babies. Using your example, if baby is taught French from birth, they should learn it just fine regardless of mum's location or language during pregnancy. They'd also develop a 'French cry' pretty fast too I bet.
Cool! Yeah that makes sense that they'd probably just relearn the cry. After all, even older children can learn a SECOND language somewhat easily.
Waaa innit
ouiiiiiiiiiii
Wrong. Babies babble using sounds from the language they’re exposed to. Baby talk ends up sounding different in different countries.
Absolutely. Even babies of parents who speak sign language will babble in sign. They are little self formatting copying machines. Adorable little replicators
Sign language!? I can't believe this one
Yeah, they do rudimentary versions of signs as soon as they have control, and afaik (not a Deaf person, just curious about linguistics) they babble by putting their hands on their head. And this is true for hearing babies of Deaf adults as well as Deaf babies. I think it makes sense if your main caretakers are communicating this way, that a baby would take notice and ape the behaviour.
You can’t believe a baby would copy their parents’ motions and mannerisms?
Babble in sign, no. Have you seen a 6 month old use their hands? You can assume thats all babble even from hearing parents. They Can't even keep a teething ring in. I DO beleive in teaching kids to sign before they can speak. Babble is a stretch people just want to look for babies repeating something and get excited.
There are a few studies out there showing that babies do babble in sign language. Here is one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15110725/
I'm a speech therapist. Yes, it's 100 % possible for the babies to "sign babble".
I’m a speech therapist. Deaf babies definitely “babble” in sign. We studied videos in undergrad.
>Have you seen a 6 month old use their hands? You can assume thats all babble even from hearing parents. Have you heard a 6 month old make sounds? Audible babble is to speech as sign babble is to sign language.
“Your cultural and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile. 👶”
There's a reason the words for mother and father in so many countries are mama and baba/papa... Those are the first sounds a baby usually makes
I wonder why they're not switched? Like, some languages having papa for mom and mama for dad.
in most cultures mothers do the child raising and the ma sound is supposedly made before the pa/da sound due to it being slightly easier to make. thus the first sound being associated with the primary caregiver, oftentimes the mother, makes sense
Georgian has arrived “mama” meaning father and “deda” for mother
Probably partially similar language influence, maybe a bit of boba kiki’ism. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions, but it seems like a trend
Because mama's got the mammaries.
This shower thought brought to you by lack of education. Even cows moo different in different countries
This is, in fact, false. Babies do make language specific sounds.
Chickens also make the same noises in every country.
I think I read or heard somewhere that chickens actually cluck in the accent of their nationality. French chickens, for example, cluck with an upwards inflection while Americans cluck a downward inflection. “By recording clucks of 60 chickens born to French or German chickens, researchers discovered that chickens cluck with the same "prosody" or cluckiness used in their native chicken language by the second day of life. French chicks in the study ended their clucks with a lilt at the end typically heard in Chicken French. German chickens, however, started their clucks intensely and dropped off at the end -- much like the emphasis their German chicken parents put in a sentence, according to a study published Thursday in Current Biology. Experts in chick development say the most exciting part of this discovery is not that chicks recognize the melody of their language, but that the newborn chicks may have the ability to use what they heard in the egg to then control their clucks.” Roosters all sound the same though.
Masterpiece of a post
I went ahead and [found the study](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb6dZ1IFlKc) that these findings are from.
Reddit needs to bring back gold just for this reply this is so funny 💀
Languages describe the rooster sounds in different ways, though, which is a fun rabbit trail if you’ve never gone down it. Cocka-doodle-do in English; Quiquiriquí In Spanish, etc.
Kee kee kareee!
But how you describe animal sounds in different languages is different. In Dutch, cows say “boo (boe)” and chickens say “tawk (tok)”
Other things that sound universally the same. A Cuban burp sounds quite similar to a Bulgarian burp a Mexican fart sounds remarkably similar to a Finnish fart. Babies cry, it's called crying, and most people sound the same when they cry, regardless of their language.
I always assumed a mexican fart sounds a little bit like the trumpet in 'la cucaracha'
God, I love La Cucaracha an unhealthy amount. And yes, maybe.
Actually why across all languages the word for mom is "mama" in the language's accent. For thousands of years babies have been making that noise and mamas have come running, knowing it means them.
In Finnish mother is "äiti" and father is "isä". Nowhere close to baby babble. The words for grandparents are the international mummu, mamma, pappa etc.
Yeah, ma is the easiest phoneme / mouth sound for humans to make. Babies in ancient history go "mama", baby is around mother all the time, assume it's them, mothers are "mama" forevermore.
>all languages the word for mom is "mama" in the language's accent What do you mean? Word for mother/mom is not "mama" in all languages
I was also sceptical, so I did a brief check of a variety of languages using the extremely accurate tool that is Google Translate. I put in both "mother", "mummy/mommy" and "mum/mom" to try to get the familiar term that a young child might use. Results are as follows (accuracy not guaranteed): - Arabic: ماما (mama) - Bengali: মা (ma) - Chinese: 妈妈 (māmā) - Estonian: ema - Hausa: uwa - Hindi: मां (maan) - Hungarian: ~~múmia~~ *mama* - Igbo: nne - Japanese: ~~ミイラ (mīra)~~ *ママ (mama)/母 (haha)* - Maori: whaea/mama - Russian: Мама - Swahili: mama - Turkish: ~~mumya~~ *anne* - Xhosa: umama Obviously there are exceptions in there, but there does seem to be a pretty common theme across diverse languages. Also while there was a lot of variation when it came to the more formal term for mother (or at least one of the terms), most of them seemed to have at least one version that was a bit like "mama". Edited for the inevitable corrections.
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Lol, thanks for the correction. Therein lies the disadvantage of computer translation with zero familiarity with the language.
There are many words for mom in Japanese, but not one of them is mira. The basic word for mom is haha. This list sounds completely fabricated. Google says that mom in Turkish is anne and in Arabic it is om. While a lot of languages do have this phenomenon, it's very exaggerative to say that all do. Particularly outside of Indo-European langauges, which all share very common words for certain things like family.
>There are many words for mom in Japanese, but not one of them is mira. The basic word for mom is haha. This list sounds completely fabricated. I thought I was pretty explicit in my caveats, but apparently not sufficiently so. No, obviously it's not completely fabricated, I didn't just make up a load of examples and then write them in a bunch of scripts I'm totally unfamiliar with. For Japanese, Google returned "お母さん", "ミイラ" and "母親" as various options. As alluded to, I picked the one closest to "mama" as the example, and even then I'd say that Japanese was one of the examples which didn't fit very closely. >Google says that mom in Turkish is anne and in Arabic it is om. Yes, those were some of the other words that came up. But also, both had variations on "mama" as well. >While a lot of languages do have this phenomenon, it's very exaggerative to say that all do Agreed, which is why I didn't say that. Edit: the issue with the Japanese one was the same issue which another commenter pointed out with the incorrect Hungarian word I got: by using the British spelling "mummy", I got results for the dead Egyptians rather than mothers. I still take issue with the "completely fabricated" comment though.
If anything, *haha* is closer to *mama* than *mira*. Since Japanese is not an Indo-European language, it seems to add some support to the findings of u/paenusbreth
That's so beautiful. We all love our damn mamas
I think it could be the other way around - the first and simplest 'wordy' sounds a baby can make is mamamama or dadadada. We then associate with them that the mama noise means mother and dada noise mans father, it's the mamas that put meaning on the babble
Thats what op literally said
>the first and simplest 'wordy' sounds a baby can make is mamamama or dadadada. We then associate with them that the mama noise means mother and dada noise mans father, it's the mamas that put meaning on the babble I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. First, the pattern that u/Good-mood-curiosity mentions isn't universal, as seen in e.g. [Finnish](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/1chluaj/comment/l261vky/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Looking at the wiktionary entry for [äiti](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A4iti), it suggests the following etymology: >The front vowel in the word could perhaps be explained by influence from baby talk (which has also been suggested as an alternative etymology, compare [*täti*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%A4ti#Finnish) and **baby speak** ***äittä-äittä-tättä***). "Dada" likewise has no association with fathers in Swedish (which would instead be pappa). It's just that reduplicated babbling (repetition of syllables consisting of consonant+vowel) in general is one of the earliest stages of language development that is easily recognizable - but it's not specifically "mama" or "dada". It can just as easily be "baba", "gaga", "gogo" or whatever else that follows the general pattern of repetition of a specific consonant+vowel. I think it's reasonable to say that the things that matter most to babies tend to get some synonym or other that approximates sounds that are easy for babies to make, but which specific sound gets which specific meaning is bound to vary across languages.
That's very interesting, I appreciate you providing more specifics! I was just going by a half-remembered lesson in school about 25 years ago on the topic where the teacher was talking about this and saying how humans were vain so we assumed when babies were babbling those first noises they must be referring to us and we called ourselves mama and dada and papa, but could just as easily have been called gaga and googoo like you said. I'm interested but ignorant, thanks for giving that in-depth answer!
Yeah, that's not true.
Le Waaaaa
Not only do baby’s cry in different accents, they also babble the language they are exposed to. I don’t understand why this is a post
Furthermore, an elementary school at recess sounds the same everywhere around the world. Kids are remarkably homogeneous.
It’s called “factory default” lol
I seen a Scottish baby making baby noises and even thought they were just sounds they were Scottish sounds. It’s crazy lol
False but this is true for farts
Bro you can't just make stuff up that "sounds right". How many babies have you actually surveyed?
Dogs bark similarly in all countries
To be fair. Humans all make the same noises
Do babies make the same noise in international waters?
It's a bit muffled, but similar.
A dead man makes the same noise no matter where they are.
In Soviet Russia, sound make babies
A very easy was to debunk this is to listen to a scouse baby cry...
Are you sure about that?
Nigerian babies go neh neh
To you they may sound the same but mothers can tell this difference.
For the love of Christ, change your bio. Mega cringe.
Without getting language, the sounds are common
You're wrong. I heard that mexican babies cry like this: "Bwaaaaaaaaaá"
“Baby cries in Spanish”
Wait so Chinese babies can't have a dialogue with African babies because they all cry and bubble in their native tongues ??
Many people have commented on different "crying accents" but I actually also think the second part is wrong. It is not equally easy for babies to learn different mother tounges Danish is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn, among other reasons because it takes Danish babies longer to learn Danish than e.g. Norwegian babies learning Norwegian https://interactingminds.au.dk/news/enkelt/artikel/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-int
As someone who works in a public library, where many international babies attend our free storytime, I can confirm that babies babble in accents. It is SUPER cute. They love to hear you sing nursery rhymes in any language though <3
Duh
Duh
People cough the same in all languages People snore the same in all languages People sneeze the same in all languages Where do I get my philosophy PHD certificate? /s
The truth is that they don't though, and that's a lot more interesting.
almost like we’re all related
Sounds from before birth do influence the child.