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Cake day: July 22nd, 2025

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  • Baba is the word for father in a bunch of languages.

    As one of the first utterances many babies are able to say, baba (like mama, papa, and dada) has come to be used in many languages as a term for various family members:

    father: Albanian, Arabic, Western Armenian, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Greek, Marathi, Marshallese, Mingrelian, Nepali, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu  
    grandmother: many Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian, Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish; a doublet of bubbe), Romanian, Yiddish, Japanese  
    grandfather: Azerbaijani, Zulu (father, grandfather)  
    baby: Afrikaans, Sinhala, Hungarian  
    
    
    You can hear the zulu one in the opening lines of The Lion King song Circle of Life. 
    
    "Nants ingonyama bagithi baba." literally means "hear comes the lion, father"  
    
    

  • Babies first sounds are usually a consonant followed by a vowel. So ma, pa, ga, gu, ba. A few months later they start duplicating the sounds while testing out their speaking abilities so you get mama, papa, gaga, googoo, baba. Which are common first words for lots of baby things. Like baba for my sister was her bottle. Every baby might not say every variation while they’re learning and they will obviously have favorite words but generally that’s why we consider baby speech like that. Maybe english just happens to choose the “g” for the leading consonant because we have a lot of hard g words in english and that’s what babies pick up on first.