Speech in 18mo - doesn’t say Mama

[terrifiedofgoingblind]

My 18mo little boy doesn’t call me Mama, he calls me Baba. I refer to myself as Mummy, and when he hears the word mummy (where is mummy? Etc) he will point and say “Baba!”.
He is REALLY chatty and has loads of words and animal sounds, recently started using quantifiers like big bus, baby cat for example. He has no issues with the M sounds, he will happily say more more, moon, milk. He didn’t babble much and went straight to his first words of dada, cat, snack. mama for a while then it turned into baba.
Not sure if I should be worried as it’s such a basic word, he’s making the association but calling me something else?

I don't think I'd worry about this. It sounds like he knows perfectly well who you are, he's just got his own name for you. It might simply be the name he's chosen, but if you react to him saying 'Baba!', he might also enjoy the reaction.

My eldest went through a similar phase of calling a particular airplane a horse. She'd done it once, presumably by accident (it was a puzzle piece, and one of the other pieces was a horse), and had found our reaction funny, so she kept doing it – it was her 18 month old version of a joke. We stopped reacting to it and it passed, although I'm sure it feels harder when it's about you, not a puzzle piece.