In 1960, a linguist named Roman Jakobson wrote a paper that tried to explain a mystery nobody had figured out.

All over the world — in languages that had no shared ancestors — the word for mother started with an “m” and an open vowel. Mama in Spanish. Mama in English. Máma in Czech. Maman in French. 엄마 (omma) in Korean. אמא (ima) in Hebrew. Madre in Italian. Mama in Swahili. Mor in Swedish. Ana in Turkish. Amá in Navajo. Mama in Mandarin. Mama in languages that last touched each other forty thousand years ago.

This shouldn’t be possible. Unrelated languages usually have wildly different vocabulary. Water is agua / mizu / maji / vatten / suu — no pattern, no shared sound. But mother is the same.

Why?

Jakobson’s answer was almost embarrassingly simple: babies. The “mama” sound is just the easiest noise a human mouth can make. It’s the first consonant an infant can control (lips pressing together) followed by the first vowel (mouth wide open). Every baby on Earth, independently, makes that sound before any other. They make it most when they’re nursing or being held — so the caregiver, every caregiver, everywhere, for all of human history, heard that sound when they were closest to their child.

And so every culture on Earth — independently — named the mother after the sound the baby was already making.

The word didn’t come from the adult. The word came from the child.

What This Actually Means

Think about what this fact is doing, logically.

It means there is a word in your mouth that you learned before you learned you were human. Before you learned what language was. Before you knew you were separate from your mother. Before you had any concept of self, other, inside, outside, mine, yours, us, them.

And that word is almost the same as the word a kid in Mongolia is saying right now to his mother. And a kid in Peru. And a kid in Iceland. And a kid in Lagos. And a kid three thousand years ago in a language whose name we don’t even know anymore.

The same word. In your mouth. Right now.

Before you were a nationality, you were a baby saying mama. Before you were a religion, you were a baby saying mama. Before you were a political orientation, a demographic, a consumer profile, a voting bloc — you were a baby saying mama.

Everyone reading this was a baby saying some variation of mama. Everyone who ever hated you was a baby saying some variation of mama. Everyone who ever wanted to hurt you, everyone you’ve ever feared, everyone you’ve been taught to suspect — all of them were once small, warm, held, trying to make the easiest sound their mouth could make to summon the person who loved them most.

That is the entire argument against tribalism. Not politically. Biologically. Your tribe was too small. Your people were too small. The common ground is so much deeper than culture goes that culture cannot even see it.

The Grandfather Verse

I wrote a song about this called Mother Tongue. It opens with a music box and a heartbeat. I’ll tell you about one verse.

My wife’s grandfather died when he was 91. He’d been forgetting things for years. He forgot our names. He forgot where he lived. He forgot what year it was. At the very end, in the hospital bed, the last word he said — and his wife, who’d been married to him for 68 years, told me this directly — was mama.

This man was 91 years old. He had been called grandpa for 40 years. Dad for 60. Husband for 68. Sir, mister, doctor, you, hey — thousands of names his whole life. All of them fell off. The one word that stayed, all the way to the bottom of memory — was mama.

Because it was the first word he ever learned. And the first one is the last one to go. The mother tongue is the mother tongue because it is both. The first door and the last.

What They Took From Us

The machine of tribe and war is built on top of a forgetting. Whoever wants you to hate someone needs you to forget that they were once a baby saying mama. That’s the trick. That’s the whole trick.

Watch propaganda against any enemy people — past or present — and you will notice the same pattern: the enemy is never shown as small. Never as a child. Never as a baby being held. They are only shown as adults, uniformed, faces set in anger, dehumanized into a them.

Because if you saw the baby, you would remember the word.

And the word is the same word.

The Song

Mother Tongue is a neo-soul ballad with a Brazilian pivot and a gospel finale. It rolls out the mother-words of eight languages, then the father-words, then asks the question: what if the first word was the last word? What if the mother tongue is the only tongue we ever really spoke?

I wrote it for anyone who’s ever forgotten they were held. Which is all of us, eventually, most days.

Send it to your mom. Send it to someone who was yours. Send it to someone who hasn’t called their mother in a while. Send it to someone who’s about to become one. Send it to a grandmother. Send it to a stranger who looks like they need a reminder.

The first word is the last word. And the last word is the same.

🔥 Listen: [Bandcamp link] Subscribe: [newsletter link]

Next Monday: Sol / Soleil / 해. The sun doesn’t pick sides.