Words that are the same in every language
Words that are the same in every language are rarer than people think, but a few come close. "Huh?" is the strongest case: a 2013 study found that it works almost the same way, and sounds almost the same, in every language tested. Mama and papa turn up across unrelated languages because of how babies babble. And tea is nearly universal, though in two forms, tea and chai, and which one a language has depends on whether tea reached it by sea or by land. Below is the evidence for each, and why these words travel when most do not.
"Huh?": the nearest thing to a universal word
In 2013 Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, published a paper with a direct title: Is "Huh?" a Universal Word? They recorded natural, informal conversations in ten languages from five continents, languages that differ "fundamentally in terms of phonology, word structure, and grammar", including Siwu from Ghana and Lao from Laos.
They looked at one moment in conversation: when someone has not caught what was just said and signals it, so the speaker repeats. In every language, the word used there was a short, one-syllable sound like huh? or eh?, with a low or rising question tone. The similarities, they found, were "much greater than expected by chance".
Their two conclusions:
- It is universal. Every language they examined had it, in roughly the same form and for the same job.
- It is a word, not a grunt. It is, in the authors' words, "a lexical, conventionalised form that has to be learnt, unlike grunts or emotional cries".
Why the same word everywhere? Not because it is innate, the authors argue, but because every language faces the same problem: in conversation you need a signal that is quick to make, hard to miss and does not interrupt. A short, neutral question-sound is the best solution, and languages arrived at it independently. They call it convergent evolution, the way wings evolved separately in birds and bats.
Mama and papa
In a great many languages the word for mother contains m and the word for father p, b or t. Wikipedia lists Swahili and Quechua mama, Navajo amá, Polish mama and Mandarin māma for mother, and Aramaic abba, Yoruba bàbá, Persian baba and Mandarin bàba for father. Many of these languages are not related at all.
The explanation is in the baby, not in history. Ma, pa, ba and da are among the easiest syllables a human can make: a consonant made with the lips and an open vowel. Babies produce them early in babbling, and parents in every culture take the first sounds as names for themselves. The linguist Roman Jakobson also suggested that the m of mama comes from the nasal murmur babies make while feeding.
There are exceptions, which show this is a tendency, not a law: Fijian nana and Turkish ana for mother, and in Old Japanese, papa meant mother. Te reo Māori has whaea and matua, and also the everyday māmā and pāpā.
Tea or chai
Almost every language has a word for tea from Chinese, but in two different shapes, and the World Atlas of Language Structures has mapped which language has which. Of the 230 languages it sampled, 110 use a word from cha and 84 a word from te; 36 have something else.
Both forms come from China. Most Chinese languages say something like Mandarin chá. But Min Nan, spoken around the port of Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian, says te. The Dutch, who were the main importers of tea into Europe, traded through Amoy, took the word thee, and spread it: hence English tea, French thé, German Tee, Spanish té and Italian tè.
The Portuguese got to China first, in the 16th century, but through Macao, where Cantonese says cha. So Portuguese says chá, the odd one out in western Europe. And the countries of eastern Europe and Asia that got their tea overland, not from the Dutch, took the cha form too, which is why words like chai are found right across them.
The rule of thumb is a good one: te came by sea, from the Dutch; cha came by land, or via Portuguese Macao. English has both now, since chai came back as the name of a spiced tea. And Mandarin and Shanghainese both write 茶, the character the word began with.
Words that spread by borrowing
The words above are the same for natural reasons. Most words that are nearly universal today got that way by being borrowed, usually recently.
- OK is the best-known example, and how often each language says it is counted in how to say OK in different languages.
- Taxi, hotel, pizza, chocolate and coffee spread with the things they name. How often films say pizza, against each country's own dishes, is in food words on screen.
- Hello and its relatives spread with the telephone, as in Portuguese alô: see greetings in Portuguese and hello and goodbye, ranked.
And the opposite case, words that exist in one language and have no equivalent elsewhere, are collected in words that don't exist in English. The animal noises, which every language invents for itself, are in animal sounds in different languages.
Sources
- Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F. & Enfield, N. J. (2013). Is “Huh?” a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure and the Convergent Evolution of Linguistic Items. PLOS ONE 8(11): e78273. journals.plos.org
- Dahl, Ö. (2013). Tea. In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 138. wals.info
- Wikipedia: Mama and papa, for the examples, the babbling explanation, Jakobson's suggestion and the exceptions.
- Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whaea and mātua; Verbavia's te reo Māori word list for māmā and pāpā.