Mother and Mama: a History of Word Usage

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to study the coexistence of the lexical units mother and mama at different stages of the history of the Russian language, as a result of which it is concluded that the lexical unit mother has been displaced from the communicative space outside the situation of direct address. The study takes into account a large chronological period, starting with biblical texts (Psalter, Gospel), data from dictionaries (Dictionary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dictionary of the Pushkin Language, Dictionary of Dahl, MAS), memoirs and literary texts are taken into account. The research conducted on the basis of the method of purposeful observation allows to conclude that over the course of two centuries, the lexical unit mother has been gradually replaced by the word mama. The author sees one of the possible reasons for this process in the expansion of the limits of the use of obscene expressions with the mother component and suggests that, despite the revealed trend, the word mother will remain in combinations where it acts as a symbol of the cultural code: mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mother Theotokos, etc.