Hi! I'm a linguist, and this topic is one that comes up commonly.

The answer is no. There is no such thing as languages/words that are native to humans. You can have things that are widely shared (mama/papa based on baby-talk as an example), but seeing as language itself is not universal to humans, there is no such thing as a word that is universal.

Feel free to ask any questions if you're curious!

"mhm" to signify you're still listening and following along seems pretty universal to me.

I read somewhere recently that "OK" is the most widely used expression accross languages. Not universal per se, but close enough.

Just to counter the "Mother" example, in Finnish the word is "äiti". One could argue "mamma" is also used, but in my opinion it's just Swedish influence and not really used in the Eastern parts.

The topic is very interesting however, and recently I've read about the theory of universal grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar which is a theory roughly saying that every human has an innate biological understanding for certain rules of grammar - independent of upbringing, culture and the like. For example, every human language will distinguish between nouns and vowels and verbs. The concept is fascinating, but so is the criticism. You could argue that the whole idea is just unfalsifiable pseudoscience or post-hoc explanation for what has been observed.

In the 13th century, Frederick II was the Holy Roman Emperor. He supposedly carried out a famous language deprivation experiment where he had infants raised by foster mothers who were not allowed to talk to them--they could only feed and bathe then. This was to see if there is a natural human language, he thought Greek or Hebrew might emerge. It turns out that the children all died. In sociology this is taught as proof that humans need language and social interaction to survive. But the whole story comes from a single Franciscan monk who was apparently not a fan of the emperor, so there's some doubt.

There is reason to believe that there is some fairly universal mapping of sounds to meanings, even if the sounds are made-up nonesense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Well, in Georgian language "mama" is the word for father and "deda" is the word for mother so.

As to the actual exoressive words that are not about items then no, I don't believe there's any "universal words" - some words kinda became "natural" for many cultures like "ok", "'alo" (when answering a call). Yet Turkish for "ok" is "tamam" and older folks might not understand "ok". In my experience even sounds are not quite the same across the globe.

Overall I think there's definitely a way to universally express basic needs and feelings like anger, sadness, confusion, etc. with sounds and expressions combined - people might not get the cause but they'll get the point.

P. S. On the second thought - crying is quite universal, yeah.

I'm far from any kind of authority on this, but I think you'll find the similarities in language (like ma mama mom mum mother mummy) come from the fact that very many languages today stem from the same root languages.

What I find far more interesting is where they diverge.

Ananas Anana Aнана́с Ananass Nanas Mananasi

... In English?

Pineapple...

Wtf!

Edit: I've just remembered reading that "mama" and "papa" come from the sounds that babies make naturally...

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/why-does-mother-sound-the-same-in-so-many-languages

There is not a single word that's universal to all languages.

1. Even if there had ever been one at some point, there are languages that have/had word retirement as part of the culture speaking it: If a word is used as someone's name and that person dies, that word is now taboo and a new word is needed to refer to what the old word stood for.

2. Conlanging, especially by laypeople, often explicitly makes up most or all of its vocabulary from scratch or uses cyphers to make the connection invisible. I wouldn't be surprised if a people made up their own secret language from scratch, maybe initially with very similar grammar, that developed into a native language for a community.

3. Have you heard of Cockney rhyming slang? Take a word like "fart", use a two part word that rhymes with it, like "raspberry tart", then drop the rhyming part. That leaves you with "raspberry" meaning "fart" and no discernible connection to the old words this utterance/meaning pair came from.

4. Sign languages are languages as well, and in multiple instances developed from the ground up without influence from the surrounding spoken languages.

Waving to say Hi or Hello seems to be close enough to universal at this point. It's not completely universal, since there are some cultures, like the Sentinelese that might be isolated enough that they would not understand what it means, but for the most part, you can go most places in the world, wave at someone, and reasonably expect it to be interpreted as a greeting (whether greeting a stranger is appropriate in the culture is another thing entirely).

Various noises are also fairly universal, since humans mostly make the same kinds of noises. A sneeze may vary slightly in how it is written out, but it's near-universal in its interpretation (if you're a human). Same for a scream.

Most people in the world understand what "fuck off" means