A few days ago my friend Neil Croll posted the following on my Facebook page:

He commented: “I saw this today and I’m skeptical, but I thought I would check with a linguist, since I know one who also knows a lot about babies.”

This theory goes back to a 2009 study published in Current Biology in which the researchers claim that the melody of newborn babies’ cries is shaped by their native language. In the study, the cries of 60 newborns were recorded and analyzed. (I’m glad I wasn’t there that day!) Half of the babies were born into French-speaking families, while the other half were born into German-speaking families. The infants were all healthy and aged between 3-5 days old. The French babies tended to cry with a rising melody from low to high, while the German babies cried with a falling melody from high to low. Like a kind of accent, these melodies were consistent with the patterns of the babies’ native languages (that is, the language spoken by their caregivers). The results suggest that newborns memorize and mimic the intonation patterns of their surrounding language.

If this research is accurate then the surrounding language influences babies earlier than previously thought.

This is not to say that babies have language. Babies’ cries communicate information, such as hunger, discomfort, pain, fear, and tiredness, but cries are not linguistic. That is, they are not a part of language, but they may be a seed for language development.

Do babies’ cries sound different across languages? These are the results of a single study and more research is needed, but there are some known factors that make this theory possible. Fetuses in the womb begin to hear sounds from week 16. We know that in the third trimester of pregnancy babies can memorize sounds, such as their mother’s voice and simple music melodies. We also know that babies can recognize and differentiate languages. So, it is possible that babies’ cries mimic the surrounding language they heard prenatally, bringing a new meaning to the phrase “mother tongue”.

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