First opened Tuesday, May 4, 2010
母
はは
- head-high (atamadaka): falls after mora 1
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
(my) mother
Mother was papa, drifted to hawa, then a doubled sound pulled it back to haha in the late 16th century.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 母
In a sentence
母は留守です。
Mother is away from home.
母は頭が古い。
Mother has old-fashioned ideas.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “From Old Japanese papa, in turn traced to Proto-Japonic *papa.”
- “/haha/: */papa/ → /fafa/ → /fawa/ → /fafa/ → /haha/.”
- “First cited to a portion of the Shoku Nihongi dated to 729, with the phonetic spelling 婆婆 (papa).”
- Hedged“Medial /f/ [ɸ] regularly changes to /w/ [ɰᵝ], resulting in /fawa/ → /hawa/, the expected final form; see hawa below. This form first appears in the Heian period. However, likely due to spelling influence or reduplication associations, the earlier /fafa/ resurfaced in the late 16th century towards the end of the Muromachi period, with both forms seen until recent times, when hawa falls into disuse. Initial /f-/ [ɸ] regularly becomes [h], resulting in modern [ha̠ha̠].”
Source: Wiktionary: 母 (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 母 on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はは. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はわ
- “From Old Japanese, the phonologically expected development. See etymology for haha above for details.”
は
- “From Old Japanese. Possibly an abbreviation of haha, or possibly the original form.”
あも
- “From Old Japanese. Obsolete and unused in modern Japanese. Already falling into disuse by the writing of the Man'yōshū in 759, where it is only found in pieces written in eastern dialects. Possibly cognate with Korean 엄마 (eomma, “mother”), 어머니 (eomeoni, “mother”).”
おも
- “From Old Japanese. Obsolete and unused in modern Japanese. Appears to be an alteration from amo above.”
かか
- “Unknown. One theory holds that this is a corrupted and abbreviated form of 御方様 (okatasama), a term to refer to or address someone else's wife (now extremely formal, but much more everyday in the Edo period), possibly influenced by children's speech.”
- “/okatasama/ → /katasama/ → /kakasama/ → /kaka/”
かあ
- “Alteration of kaka: /kaka/ → /-kka/ → /kaː/”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.
- Derivation
- A word built from a stem plus a suffix or prefix.
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.