Michael Erard: Writer, Linguist, Author of Bye Bye I Love You and Babel No More

About

I might have been an economic historian or a speech language pathologist. At one point, I aspired briefly to be a child saint. But the ball bounces funny sometimes, as everyone knows.

I'm a writer and researcher. I’m obsessed with connecting, and with figuring out a way. A liberal arts education trained me to ask better questions. From journalism and scholarship I take tools for exploring those questions, in my own way, and taking others along. From linguistics I take a specific angle on the human experience. See full bio.

Current projects

Coming in 2025, my new book: Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words.

With our earliest utterances and gestures, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as ready to participate in social life. With our final ones, we mark the place where others must release us to death’s embrace.

The language sciences have thoroughly explored the former, called “first words,” but they’ve paid surprisingly little attention to the latter, called “last words,” and certainly not treated them together. Until now.

To get a sense of my approach, read two pieces that I wrote for The Atlantic here and here.

Babel No More:

The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners

My book, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, is a story about looking for something – and a someone – which may or may not exist, and it's a story about how to make that something and someone meaningful.

The "something" is the ability to speak a lot of languages and learn them very easily, and the "someone" is the most lingual person in the world. (Who does exist, by the way – more about that, in a bit). I've tried to make him (and people like him) meaningful to science, and to people who don't speak a lot of languages. People, that is, like me. I've studied Spanish and Mandarin and had some proficiency in the past, but I use mostly English now; I call myself a monolingual with benefits.

Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

Um...:

Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

Um… is about how you really speak, and why it’s normal for your casual, everyday speaking to be filled with verbal blunders – about one every ten words. Why do they happen? Why can’t we control them? What can you tell about the people who make them?

In this charming, engaging account of language in the wild, linguist and writer Michael Erard also explains why our attention to some verbal blunders rises and falls. Why was the spoonerism named after Reverend Spooner, not some other absent-minded person? Where did the Freudian slip come from? Why do we prize umlessness in speaking? And what about President Bush?

You’ll have new ways to hear yourself and others talk, once you’ve met the people who work with verbal blunders every day – journalists, transcribers, interpreters, cops, linguists, and other scientists – and the tales that verbal blunders tell about what we want and who we are.

A delightfully original and informative account of language in the wild, full of entertaining examples, Um… is essential reading for talkers and listeners of all stripes.

Among the most surprising qualities of “Babel No More,” Michael Erard’s globe-trekking adventure in search of the world’s virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is — part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time.

Peter Constantine