A pair of false cognates consists of two words in different languages that appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates when they are in fact not. Note that there could be an indirect connection between them; however, only words sharing a common root can be considered real cognates.

For example, the word for "dog" in the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be dog, although there is no common ancestor or other connection between that language and English (the Mbabaram word evolved regularly from a protolinguistic form guduga). Similarly, the Korean word manhi (an adverb meaning "plentifully") resembles the English "many" and in the Japanese language the word 'to occur' happens to be okoru. Sometimes, words merge, e.g. Finnish piikki seems like a cognate to spike, but when it has the meaning "cusp of a graph", the cognate is peak. The Japanese word for 'you' is anata, similar to the Arabic word anta for 'you'.

The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates (cf. !Kung ba and French papa (both "father"); or Navajo má, Chinese mā, Swahili mama and English "mother"). The striking cross-linguistical similarities between this terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition (Jakobson 1962). According to Jakobson, these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that this terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (bilabial stops like m and b and the basic vowel a). See Mama and papa for more information.

The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to describe a false friend. The difference between a false cognate and a false friend is that while a false cognate means roughly the same thing in two languages, a false friend is completely unrelated, and may even, purely by chance, mean the opposite, as Welsh ie = "yes" and Japanese iie = "no").

The opposite of a false cognate is a expressive loan, which looks like a native construction, but is not.

See also

• list of false cognates

References

• Jakobson, R. (1962) ‘Why “mama” and “papa”?’ In Jakobson, R. Selected Writings, Vol. I: Phonological Studies, pp. 538–545. The Hague: Mouton.

• Geoff Parkes and Alan Cornell (1992), 'NTC's Dictionary of German False Cognates', National Textbook Company, NTC Publishing Group.