Mama and papa in Indigenous Australia

Anthropologists and linguists following Murdock (1959) and Jakobson (1960) have explained the high frequency of words like mama and papa, respectively, for “mother” and “father” around the world as spontaneously recurring inventions, in the case of mama related to sounds made by an infant while breast-feeding. This type of explanation has tended to make linguists generally suspicious of finding deep etymologies for such words or reconstructing them to protolanguages. At the other extreme there are linguists of the “long-range comparison” school who believe that they can reconstruct a number of “Proto-World” or “Proto-Sapiens” kinship terms and include *mama and *papa among this set (Bancel et al. 2011; Matthey de l’Etang and Bancel 2002, 2005; Matthey de l’Etang et al. 2011). As a corrective to both these approaches we closely examine the kinship roots mama and papa, which are widespread in Australian indigenous languages. In investigating the distribution and varying meanings of these roots we use the online database of Australian kinship terms AUSTKIN, compiled as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant based at the Australian National University. Contrary to some versions of both the “Baby Talk” and “Proto-World” approaches, mama in Australia is mostly found as “father,” not “mother,” and papa is found as “mother” in some areas. Mama is a possible candidate for Proto-Pama-Nyungan “father,” but its distribution is mainly in the west of the continent and Victoria and in central and northern New South Wales with the meaning “father.” In the north of Western Australia, it shifts meaning to “elder brother”; in other places there are shifts of meaning to be discussed below. Elsewhere versions of papa are found sporadically for “father” and also for “(elder) brother.” Pap(a) is also found as “mother,” mainly in Victoria. Other kinship roots (for grandparents) have been shown to have a split distribution, with one root dominating in the east and one in the west for what is apparently a single protomeaning (McConvell 2008, and chapter 10, this volume). The distribution of mama and papa is not so clear-cut, but we outline how it can be accounted for without resorting either to recurrent invention or to inheritance from some putative proto-world ancestral language.