not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)
AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:
mamãe - portuguese
妈妈 (māmā) - chinese
ਮੰਮੀ (mamī) - punjabi
mamah - mayan (yucatec)
мама - bulgarian, russian, ukrainian
ماں (mäm) - urdu
মা (mā) - bengali
mẹ (may) - vietnamese
ママ (mama) - japanese
అమ్మ (am'ma) - telugu
mama - quechua
મમ્મી (mam'mī) - gujarati
അമ്മ (am'ma) - malayalam
amá - navajo
엄마 (omma) - korean
māmā - native hawaiian
onam - uzbek
aana - yupik
mema - tagish
μαμά (mamá) - greek
mama - swahili
أمي (umi) - arabic
mayi - chichewa
माँ (ma) - hindi
mam - dutch
ម៉ាក់ (ma) - khmer
แม่ (mæ̀) - thai
அம்மா (am'mā) - tamil
අම්මා (ammā) - sinhala
amai - zulu
ama - basque
आमा (āmā) - nepali
အမေ (amay) - myanmar (burmese)
אמא (ima) - hebrew
mamá - spanish
mom/mum- english
this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.
babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!
