Words from a Bilingual Childhood
When my daughter Nadia was 22 months old, there were several words in her speech that deserved special attention. Some were English, some were Russian, and some seemed to exist somewhere between the two languages.
MaPa
Nadia’s first words were, of course, the obligatory Mama and Papa. First Mama, then Papa.
Mama and Papa are words in both Russian and English. American English speakers will rightly point out that these forms of address are uncommon in modern speech. American kids usually call their parents Mom and Dad, and the same was true when I was a kid. However, it is important to me that Mama and Papa are the same in both languages. Nadia had already understood that her mother and father spoke differently. I knew she would be dealing with countless linguistic and cultural differences throughout her life. Let at least something be the same.
Perhaps because Anastasia and I are virtually always together, Nadia created her own portmanteau, a word that I absolutely adore: MaPa.
A portmanteau, or blend word, is a word created by combining the sounds and meanings of two or more words. As you might guess, Nadia uses MaPa to address both of us simultaneously. So, when the three of us are together, instead of saying “Mama, Papa!”, she often simply shortens it to:
“MaPa!”
I love this word because it illustrates the cohesion we have as a family. Of course, mapa is also “map” in Spanish, but that’s just a fun coincidence.
Baba
Baba is an interesting word. In Russian, the word for butterfly is бабочка (babochka). Nadia apparently shortened this word to baba.
However, we were surprised when she also started referring to flowers as baba. In Russian, as in English, the word for flower (цветок — tsvetok) sounds nothing like baba.
At 22 months, baba was still one of her most frequently used words, which she employed dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day to denote everything beautiful. Indeed, with time we started to realize that baba meant not just “butterfly” or “flower,” but was used to designate all pretty and lovely things, usually bright and colorful and often with an attractive pattern.
A butterfly, a flower, the sun, a pattern on a dress or piece of fabric, a plant—these were all baba.
Interestingly, baba also sounds like the beginning of the Russian word for grandmother, бабушка (babushka). Earlier, if I remember correctly, Nadia used baba to refer to her Russian grandmother as well. Later she learned to say babushka, although the shk was difficult for her to pronounce, so it sounded more like babuka.
Bibika
Oh, my dear bibika (бибика)!
This is a Russian children’s word for a car, formed from биби (bibi), the sound of a car horn, with the diminutive ending -ka.
Nadia had been absolutely obsessed with cars and all forms of transport since the age of about 14 months. Bibika was far and away her most frequently pronounced word.
It conveyed anything with wheels: cars, strollers, bikes, wheelbarrows, shopping carts, and so on. Interestingly, airplanes, helicopters and other aircraft were also bibikas.
She said this word at least a hundred times a day, maybe more. It was often her first word after waking up and her last word before going to bed. Occasionally, she even said bibika in her sleep.
It’s funny, because when we lived in Russia we didn’t even have a car. And when we first moved to the U.S. and started driving everywhere, she hated it and cried her head off. So Nadia’s love for bibikas did not initially apply to actually riding in them.
After a couple of months, however, she seemed to enjoy the fact that we had our own bibika. In fact, one of her first phrases was:
“Mama Papa bibika GO GO GO!”
It didn’t matter how often I repeated the words car or truck to Nadia—they remained bibikas.
I often wondered when she would say bibika for the last time. I knew that would be a very sad day for me.
Bookochka
Several months later, when Nadia was two and a half, I noticed another delightful result of her growing up with Russian and English: she sometimes added Russian diminutive endings to English words.
She would take a regular English word and attach a cute little Russian suffix to it—a lovely mix of her two worlds.
My favorite?
Bookochka!
There was a period of about two months when she constantly used words like this, but eventually they began to fade.
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