I’m a young mom with a pre-teen son and he’s called me “mommy” up until he was about 10 and a half. Since then he’s been calling me “Ma” which I find pretty cute. Especially when he extends it to “Maaa” when yelling from another room. Maybe it’s a southern thing lol. Just curious about what y’all call your moms?
To her face, “Mum”, but when referring to her indirectly it’s usually, “my mother”.
I remember asking if it was OK to stop calling her “Mummy” but I’m not sure how old I was at the time. Definitely under 10 though. Probably heard other kids of the same age calling their mothers “Mum” when they were being collected from school and figured I’d better act accordingly and do the same.
(The only people who use “Mom” here are folks in the West Midlands, I think. And American ex-pats, I guess, but that doesn’t really count.)
My mother goes by mum or grannie, but my wife goes my mom, pronounced “mum”.
That’s because “mom” is a shortening of “mother” which is what she is, but “mum” is a shortening of “ma’am” which is a shortening of “madame” which means “my lady” and is what you call someone of a higher social class than you. And she wanted to get as far away from class hierarchy in the house as possible.
They’re both generally “my mother” when spoken of in the third person by me or my kids.
“Mum” is a shortening of “mummy” (or similar) which almost certainly came before “mother” (or its ancestor words) as a word for one’s primary female caregiver if not also birth giver, on account of it being baby-talk that ancient parents naturally took to be a name bestowed by the child.
In languages descended from Proto-Indo-European, the -t(h)er suffix is a familial grammatical particle that has long since ceased being productive, and remains frozen in all daughter languages. Speaking of which, the -ter of “daughter” is the same particle.
That “mum”, at least phonetically, is also an abbreviation of “ma’am” is a coincidence caused by dropping so many sounds from the original “ma dame” that it reverts to, well, mumbling, which isn’t far off baby talk, all things considered.
FWIW, there are places in the world where “Mam” is a name given to mothers by their children, which is also rooted in baby-talk and also has no connection to the other pronunciation of “ma’am”.