When children are young, they may not always use words in the way that adults expect them to. For example, they may refer to their toy train as “choo choo” instead of “train” and they may shorten “banana” to “nana”.
As long as a word is used independently (i.e. without prompts from others), meaningfully (i.e. used to refer to something) and consistently (i.e. used to refer to the same thing), it can be counted as a word.
Some common ‘unexpected’ first words include:
– Word approximations such as shortened words (e.g. “ba” for “bubbles”) or words said in a ‘cute, baby-ish way’ (e.g. “tat” for “cat”)
– Animal sounds (e.g. “meow meow”, “woof woof”, “quack quack”)
– Sound effects (e.g. “choo choo”, “beep beep”, ‘uh oh!”, “yum yum”)