{"id":285,"date":"2024-03-19T21:21:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T21:21:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/?p=285"},"modified":"2024-03-19T21:21:22","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T21:21:22","slug":"call-me-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/2024\/03\/19\/call-me-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Call me Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A little over a year ago I hopped on a Transpennine Express train to Manchester, bound for Media City in Salford. After one of the most adrenaline-filled days of my life, I was lucky enough to be named part of the 2023 AHRC-BBC New Generation Thinker cohort<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last year I\u2019ve not only picked up some writing tips and skills and enjoyed taking part in the three programmes that all New Gens will make in the first year – I\u2019ve met nine incredibly talented, generous and inspiring people, worked with a whole bunch more, learned how to *teach* writing as well as do it, and pushed through so many barriers of discomfort, embarrassment and imposter syndrome that I\u2019m not sure what my boundaries are any more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, that\u2019s not true. I know that I won\u2019t be able to listen to the final programme myself. But I *am* proud of it and so I\u2019d love it if you\u2019d listen on BBC Sounds right here<\/a>, and if you\u2019d rather read, I\u2019ve attached the script below (the script will be slightly longer than the broadcast, but I\u2019m reassured that all the content remains!). IF you do listen or read, please let me know what you think!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I plan to write about the New Gen application and training process in the summer when the next call opens. For now, though, I hope you enjoy a little \u201clinguistics by stealth\u201d, as my wonderful producer Ruth Watts puts it. (And if you read to the end, there are a couple of thoughts that didn\u2019t make it into the studio for you to ponder).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The script<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I am named after a wedding cake. My parents\u2019 wedding cake, to be precise, which itself reflected the popularity of the name Rebecca<\/em> in the late 1980s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am renamed thirty years later. On a windy autumnal Saturday, my first child makes a slightly earlier than expected arrival into the world. The midwife places his tiny body into my arms with words she has used and will use over and over again: \u201cHere you are, Mum.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mum<\/em> is a more common name by far than Rebecca, but in the first few months of motherhood, almost no-one calls me by it. In fact, my new name falls only from the lips of medical professionals \u2013 people that I certainly did not give birth to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The person whose presence bestows this part-name, part-title on me does not pronounce it once. He does not yet have the linguistic, cognitive or cultural capacity to call me anything, but within a few short years \u2013 months, even \u2013 he will have mastered the physical manoeuvres and social knowledge necessary for calling me mother<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This process fascinates me as a parent, but also as a linguist. Not a linguist who learns to communicate in other languages, but one who studies the properties of the human communication system, in all its variety, and how people learn to use it. Though language has been studied for years in fields such as rhetoric, psychology and anthropology, the field of linguistics, which applies the scientific method to the study of language, is much younger. Growing out of philosophy and philology departments through the lectures of scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics gained traction as a field in its own right as late as the mid-20th<\/sup>\u00a0century thanks to innovative and controversial thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff. My research focuses on child language acquisition, an area of interest with roots in psychology that was strongly shaped by 20th century thinkers \u2013 on which more later. So, having acquired a child, I couldn\u2019t wait to see how he acquired the language he was surrounded by \u2013 in his case, English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the very beginning, however, he was busy developing a set of cries to communicate his different needs and desires. The most memorable of these communicated hunger \u2013 a plaintive \u201cniiiiiing\u201d, with consonant \u201cn\u201d and the long, drawn-out vowel \u201ci\u201d evoking \u201cneed\u201d. The final nasal \u201cng\u201d required him to press the back of his tongue against the soft palate, completely closing off the mouth from the nose and the back of the throat. This is the same tongue posture that he would need to receive milk safely. That sound \u201cng\u201d, then, was a figurative and literal demonstration that he was ready for food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given his propensity for nasal sounds like \u201cn\u201d and \u201cng\u201d, I may have got my hopes up that these, and the other nasal consonant in English, \u201cm\u201d, might guide my child\u2019s first words, and that my new moniker,\u00a0mum,\u00a0<\/em>might be early among them. Indeed, as anthropologist George Peter Murdock demonstrated in the 1950s, maternal names across the globe overwhelmingly include nasal consonants, from Turkish\u00a0anne\u00a0<\/em>to Arabic\u00a0umm<\/em>, Basque ama\u00a0<\/em>to Tagalog\u00a0nanay.\u00a0<\/em>Linguist Roman Jakobson surmised that maternal names, especially the childlike so-called \u201cnursery names\u201d, are rooted in the nose for a very practical reason. When feeding, whether at breast or bottle, air can only pass through the nose, and so feedback from the child during this activity, which can take quite some time, is often expressed through nasal murmurs and mutterings. Jakobson also suggests that early utterances of \u201cmamama\u201d are not in fact utterances intended to refer specifically to the female caregiver, but rather an expression of the child\u2019s general wants and needs of the kind that mothers might often attend to.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This idea emerged in part from diaries kept by one of the most famous fathers in linguistics, the father of child language studies, Werner Leopold. Leopold, working at Northwestern University in the 1930s and 40s, kept a diary of his daughter Hildegard\u2019s earliest speech as she acquired both German, Leopold\u2019s first language, and English, her mother Marguerite\u2019s language and the language of her environment. Leopold was particularly interested in ensuring that Hildegard could indeed acquire German despite the dominance of English around her, and while some diary and observation studies of child language had been conducted by psychologists and educationalists, rare was the study that had analysed in detail the developing sound system and grammatical rules demonstrated in child speech. Leopold, however, was trained in the close transcription of sounds and fine-grained analysis of the structural interactions between parts of speech. He then applied this knowledge systematically to his observations of his daughter, later in life referring to her as his \u201cants and bees\u201d, by analogy with the creatures studied in the hard\u00a0sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did our ant under the microscope, Hildegard Leopold, refer to her parents? Leopold wrote that, for Hildegard, mama<\/em> \u201chas no intellectual meaning and cannot be considered to be a semantic alternative of papa<\/em>, which was learned with real meaning at 1 year of age. Mama<\/em> with the standard meaning,\u201d he says, \u201cwas not learned until 1 year 3 months of age.\u201d Another contemporary linguist, father and diarist, Antoine Gr\u00e9goire, made a similar observation \u2013 his son used the sound sequence mama<\/em> to express a need, particularly hunger, irrespective of his addressee, but used papa<\/em> as a name to remark on the appearance of either mother or father. In the earliest stages, then, Mama is not mama<\/em> by name, exactly, rather she is expected to respond to the needs expressed by those same sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the name on the tip of baby\u2019s tongue is, quite literally, daddy<\/em>. Place the tip of the tongue behind your teeth, close the rest of your tongue against your upper teeth, let air pressure build, and release it. Depending on whether or not your vocal cords were involved, you have just produced a \/t\/ or \/d\/ sound. These sounds, along with \/p\/ and \/b\/, predominate in paternal names across language families. Examples this time include Bulgarian tatko<\/em> and Chichewa adadi<\/em>, Kurdish bavo<\/em> and Icelandic pabbi<\/em>, all using the lips or the tongue, but not the nose, to push daddy\u2019s name into the air. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\/m,n,p,b,t,d\/. These sounds are all made at the front of the mouth with complete closure of the lips, or the tongue to the teeth. They are preceded by brief silence, or muted murmuring, before their explosive release into a vowel like \/a\/ \u2013 open, noisy, resonant. Nursery names for parents, the mama<\/em>s and n\u00ebn\u00eb<\/em>s, baba<\/em>s and pap\u00e1<\/em>s, are characterised by the repetition of vowels and consonants, repeated movements of the mouth from its most extreme open, resonant position to its most complete closure and near silence. This seems to me an allegory for parenting, where peace heralds chaos, which cedes to peace again. These movements between extreme postures are basic features of children\u2019s earliest words, as they continue to practise and move towards mastery of their facial muscles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though designed, if unconsciously, to trip off the tongue, the names mummy <\/em>and daddy<\/em> are not equal. This became abundantly clear to me when I followed in Leopold and Gr\u00e9goire\u2019s footsteps, and many others since, in recording our family interactions, with a view to learning more about how a single child acquires language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The diary of my child\u2019s language journey comprises to date 414 audio recordings, an Excel spreadsheet of his first 500 words, an ever-growing file of notes in my phone, and scraps of paper stuffed in pockets, notebooks and bags. In this latter alone am I truly Leopoldian in my diary-keeping \u2013 but I am very grateful for the technology now available to me, that allows me to examine in fine detail the melodies of my child\u2019s speech as he grows, and witness over and over again how he develops into a competent, clever conversationalist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But though technology may develop rapidly, human change moves at a much slower pace. Leopold and Gr\u00e9goire noted how daddy <\/em>is used as a referring term, as a designation for some other person in the world, much earlier than mummy<\/em>. Other linguists too have shown that children often overgeneralise Daddy<\/em> as a name to refer to female parents, and even other caregivers and adults, while mummy<\/em> arrives later, and is reserved for mothers alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In all these respects, my child is a textbook specimen. Daddy <\/em>was his second recognisable word, uttered at 11 months old. \/m:\/ and \/m\u0259\/ sounds soon followed\u2026to represent mooing, of course. At 12 months, he started to refer to me using a word from British Sign Language, learned in a baby sign class. This word was produced manually, so he would tap the crown of his head with one hand, often looking in my direction. \/m:\/ then became his vocalisation for the moon, and after two more full passages of its waxing and waning, my inconstant child finally, at 14 months old, pronounced the word mummy.<\/em> By this point, daddy<\/em> and the BSL sign had become labels freely used for any caregiver in the space, and to this day I am still occasionally called on as daddy. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, my guise as daddy<\/em> has a specially limited application that illustrates the incredibly sophisticated abilities of small children to manage relationships and conversations, even before they are reliably out of nappies. Parental names, like any given names, can be used as vocatives, that is, to call on people for their attention. Children start out by using names as standalone calls \u2013 a cry of Mummy!<\/em> or Daddy!<\/em> To find out what happens next in children\u2019s speech, I turned to modern child language diarists. This does not require a visit to a romantic library or archive \u2013 recall that child language acquisition is a young field of study. Instead, within a few clicks, I am scrolling through masses of child language recordings on the online database known as CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange System, and find that as early as 2 years of age, children start to use parental names in the middle of conversations, particularly at the end of a conversational turn, to invite a response from their conversational partner. In this way, they build and maintain a relationship with the people they\u2019re speaking to, just as adults do. Turning again to my own notes and diaries, I noticed that I was daddy<\/em>only when my child wanted to attract my attention anew. There is no confusion here \u2013 once he has my attention, I am, utterance-finally, only mummy<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in other families, naming conventions are much less clear cut, and a negotiation process may be required to ascertain who, if anyone, bears the name mummy.<\/em> In queer families, particularly those with two female-identifying parents, there are two equally obvious candidates for this title. And as we\u2019ve already established, the person with the deciding vote, the child, will not cast it for quite some time. So who names who, and how? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The LGBTQ Parental Names Project, run by the website Mombian, surveyed queer families and uncovered a range of sources for parental names, as diverse as the families themselves. For some parents, their heritage provided a route to distinction. A family with one Geordie mother and one mother from the South of England, for example, might very naturally find itself with one mam<\/em> and one mum. <\/em>This route may not always bear fruit, however \u2013 in an English-Danish household, using Danish mor<\/em> could confuse a cry for mum with a demand for, well, more!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other parents really did wait for the child to have their say, and in some cases, the child chose to use the parents\u2019 given names, perhaps in combination with a parental name. Some children clung to that all important nasal murmuring \/m\/ to mark their mothers as the same, with two different open vowels in mama <\/em>and mummy<\/em>to tease them apart, where others, like poet Maggie Nelson\u2019s stepson, played with the placement of \/m\/ at the lips, with mommy<\/em> becoming bombi, <\/em>reflecting both her motherhood and their favourite shared game, Baby Bear<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter what the make-up of your family, parental and caregiver names reveal a fascinating process of redefining yourself relative to others: to the new person who has arrived in your life, to your partner, and to society\u2019s expectations\u2026or rather, being redefined, refashioned, redubbed, over and over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raising a child is a period of constant change, and I have found that my name has changed as my child has grown. A brief dalliance with my given name was toyed with and quickly dropped. Now that he has left the nursery and its babyish reduplication of consonants behind, I am less often called mummy<\/em>. Despite this, play with the some of the sounds of mummy<\/em> cannot be resisted, and every so often I am dubbed pumpy. <\/em>Linguists here may note how, to move from \/m\/ to \/p\/, airflow through the nose stops and the vibrations of the vocal cords still. Native North Easterners, on the other hand, will note the childish humour in naming your parent after a dialect word for flatulence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My most common appellation right now, however, is\u00a0mother<\/em>. Whence this formality? My schoolchild\u2019s unwavering dedication, at least for now, to the short stories of Enid Blyton on audiobook, a world in which mothers\u2019 strict interdictions and punishments provide a springboard for their children\u2019s fantastical fairy-led adventures. Whether my new moniker is an indictment of my parenting techniques, I prefer not to know, but for now, my child, feel free to call me\u00a0Mother<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ideas left in drafts gone by\u2026<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You may have noticed that my title owes a debt to the fabulous art form of drag, in particular American forms of drag spearheaded by the global phenomenon RuPaul. I wanted to discuss the use of the term \u201cmother\u201d in Black and Latina New York drag houses, and latterly in internet speak, but it didn\u2019t fit smoothly enough, and in any case, the wonderful sociolinguist Dr Christian Ilbury from the University of Edinburgh does it much better than I could in this brilliant article, written by Soaliha Iqbal.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d have also loved to discuss how parental names are acquired cross-linguistically, and how in some cultures, they aren\u2019t in children\u2019s earliest lexicons. Why? Lots of different reasons, but some cultures have very different approaches to addressing pre-linguistic babies than the culture I was raised and am raising my children in – some don\u2019t address speech to babies at all, or wait for them to produce specific words before they can be considered to have the linguistic skills to converse with. These cultures tend to have a lot more child-to-child speech than Western cultures now do, which shifts the focus of what children hear, from whom, and with what intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A little over a year ago I hopped on a Transpennine Express train to Manchester, bound for Media City in Salford. After one of the most adrenaline-filled days of my life, I was lucky enough to be named part of the 2023 AHRC-BBC New Generation Thinker cohort. In the last year I\u2019ve not only picked … Continue reading Call me Mother<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4055,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4055"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/rebeccawoods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}