My daughter, being one-year-old, mostly keeps her thoughts to herself. I won the battle of the primordial syllables so, for the past two months, the only word she’s said is ‘dada’, a small consolation for the fact that, like her older brother, she vastly prefers her mother’s company to my own.
Her refusal to say ‘Mama’ appears to be an accident of speech and her obsessive repetitions of ‘dada’ are about as meaningful as they would be if she said the name of our local Amazon delivery man 4,000 times a day, but I’ll take the victories where they come.
I don’t yet know which of these uses of ‘dada’ are automatic responses and which might be placeholders for actual speech; tiny little attempts to articulate those thoughts and feelings she can’t yet verbalise. Still less whether she is simply referring to the early 20th-century art movement begun by the Zurich avant garde. All could be true at different points of each day, and much of my time with her is spent trying to decipher each utterance and sort it into its category.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this doesn’t make for especially scintillating conversation. But you’d be wrong. It is, inarguably, the part of her development I find the most fascinating. She’s started standing, for seconds of a time, and I cheer each time she does. Ditto her increasing dexterity with objects, at least on those occasions on which she is not smashing them over my head. But none of those small milestones fill me with as much head-scratching wonder as speech development.
There’s a Ted Talk called ‘The birth of a word’, by MIT computer scientist Deb Roy. I watched it long before I had kids. Long enough ago that people were still watching Ted Talks, I guess. In it, he illustrates his son’s fairly standard experience of language acquisition, which resulted in him learning 503 words by the age of two.
What is remarkable, however, is that Roy deployed a suite of cameras and microphones inside his home for the entire period, picking up every utterance his son made, allowing him to showcase their gradual evolution. This culminated in a 30-second clip of his son at bath time, in which we hear the babble-word ‘gaga’ slowly mutating, over months, to ‘waga’, then ‘wada’ and finally into ‘water’.
It’s a stunning sequence of audio, compacting the experience of every single human on the planet into a single, wondrous slope of increasing awareness, rendering the mundane act of speech miraculous. Moreover, it suggests that even those smallest, most garbled syllables our children offer, could be conveying meaning much earlier than we realise.
So, I watch my daughter speak with this in mind, as ‘dada’ morphs into the occasional ‘baba’ and ‘gugug’ makes its first few appearances. At bath time, she opts for ‘dededeh’, rather dashing my hopes that she would emerge with a ‘gaga’ fully formed. Not that I mind, of course. With the flowering of her language, iIt’s only a matter of time before she addresses my wife by name, and I lose the one advantage I have left. I resolve to say nothing, in the hopes I can stall this whole thing. Until she says mama by herself, mum’s the word.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
