Interestingly enough, "äiti" is actually a (very old) loanword of Germanic origin. The original Finnish word for "mother" is "emä" or "emo", deriving from the Proto-Uralic "*ämä". "Emä" and "emo" are still in use in poetry and in some compound words in a figurative sense, for instance "emolevy" (motherboard) and "emäalus" (mothership).

In modern Finnish, "mamma" is one of the words used colloquially to refer to one's grandmother (cf. "granny"). In some dialects, it can also mean simply "mother". These usages are probably loaned from Swedish where the formal words for mother and father are "mamma" and "pappa" respectively.

äiti, anya (pronounced ~aaya) and avva are still compatible with the explanation.

The Telugu word is the formal name (corresponding to mother on Wikipedia). Are you familiar with the language?

We'd need statistics on the frequency of the first consonant utterance, and see if it correllates with the distribution of the names given to mothers by babies.

Yes, Telugu is my mother-tongue and Kannada is my first-language. In spoken Telugu today, 'amma' is far more common than 'talli'. In written Telugu, both are equally common. 'talli' has secondary meaning of just refering to any female. For example, "chitti talli" (little girl), "talli-tandrulu" (mother-father, i.e., parents), etc. Similar remarks apply to Kannada. Avva is informal and more common in rural dialects.

> In spoken Telugu today, 'amma' is far more common than 'talli'.

That's intriguing, because 'amma' is the Tamil word for mother.

Talli is to mother as Amma is to the mama word from the article. Interestingly, 'mama' in Telugu is uncle.

Mama also means mother in Hungarian though. Nagymama (nagy means big) is grandmother.

North Sámi = eadni