Michael Erard is an author, journalist, and linguist known for his deep exploration of language, culture, and the human brain.
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A 19th-century hyperpolyglot reported to have known up to 72 languages, the biography of Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti explores the boundaries of how we characterize multilingualism.
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Michael Erard is a journalist, author, and linguist whose work bridges the gap between academic linguistics, cognitive science, and public humanities scholarship. He is widely recognized for his narrative non-fiction investigations into extreme language learning, communication systems, and the human brain.
Erard is the author of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, a groundbreaking, deeply researched book that serves as the definitive exploration of “hyperpolyglots”: individuals who possess the rare ability to speak six or more languages fluently. To write the book, Erard traveled the world tracking down living hyperpolyglots, scouring historical archives for legendary figures like Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, and working alongside neuroscientists to understand the structural and functional unique traits of the multilingual brain.
Beyond Babel No More, he is also the author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, an insightful examination of speech disfluency and linguistic psychology.
Erard’s journalistic perspective is grounded in formal academic expertise. He earned his MA in Linguistics and subsequently completed a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on language, rhetoric, and writing.
As an independent scholar and essayist, he has spent decades detailing how humans interact with language. His essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in a wide array of prominent publications, including the New York Times, Atlantic, Science, Wired, New Scientist, and Aeon. His work consistently emphasizes the lived, human experience of language, exploring how linguistic mastery reflects personal identity, cognitive capability, and cultural history.External
What People Actually Say Before They Die
The Atlantic | January | 2019
This deeply moving piece investigates a stark imbalance in scientific research: While we have a rich, decade-spanning understanding of how infants acquire language, there is a profound lack of systematic research into how the ability to construct sentences, and process syntax shuts down when someone is dying. Michael Erard weaves cognitive science with personal observation to track how the human mind communicates in its final moments.
Just Like, Er, Words, Not, Um, Throwaways
The New York Times | January | 2004
In this article, Michael Erard analyzes the psychological and structural role of “uh,” “um,” and verbal stumbles. Rather than treating them as meaningless linguistic garbage, he explores research showing that these fillers are actually full-fledged, functional words used to signal impending delays to listeners. Ultimately, this piece serves as an excellent public-facing look into the psycholinguistics behind natural human speech patterns.
The New York Times | January | 2012
This insightful opinion piece deconstructs the unique cultural myths surrounding language acquisition in Western nations. Michael Erard challenges the common perception that Americans are uniquely poor language learners, reframing the issue away from innate ability and toward structural educational systems, geography, and sociological motivations.
The New York Times | September | 2013
Michael Erard tackles the evolution of digital discourse by tracking the linguistic and social decay of online comment sections. He explores how early internet optimism regarding “user-generated content” ran into the realities of digital communication behaviors, examining how a lack of editorial stewardship transformed public forums into adversarial linguistic spaces.
The New York Times | October | 2017
In this article, Michael Erard explores the structural tension within the Unicode Consortium, the volunteer-led organization responsible for bringing all human writing systems into the digital sphere. Erard details how the public’s massive, commercially driven demand for increasingly diverse emojis has overwhelmed Unicode’s limited operational bandwidth, distracting engineers from the vital, painstaking work of digitizing rare and endangered global scripts (such as Hanifi Rohingya). However, he also captures a crucial paradox: The explosive popularity of emojis forces global tech giants to swiftly adopt the latest full Unicode standards, inadvertently ensuring that smartphones worldwide are updated with the infrastructure necessary to support these minority languages.
Publications by this author
Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean
Anchor | August | 2008
Um… is about how you really speak, and why it is normal for your everyday speech to be filled with errors—about one in every 10 words. In this charming, engaging account of language in the wild, linguist and writer Michael Erard also explains why our attention to some blunders rises and falls. Where did the Freudian slip come from? Why do we prize “um-lessness” in speaking, and should we? And how do we explain the American presidents who are famous for their verbal stumbles?
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Free Press | October | 2012
In Babel No More, Michael Erard, “a monolingual with benefits,” sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way, he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like the 19th-century Italian cardinal Joseph Mezzofanti, who was said to speak 72 languages, as well as those of living language-superlearners such as Alexander Arguelles, a modern-day polyglot who knows dozens of languages and shows Erard the tricks of the trade to give him a dark glimpse into the life of obsessive language acquisition.
With his ambitious examination of language, where it lives in the brain, and the cultural implications of polyglots’ pursuits, Erard explores the upper limits of our ability to learn and use languages and illuminates the intellectual potential in everyone. How do some people escape the curse of Babel—and what might the gods have demanded of them in return?The Story of Our First and Last Words
The MIT Press | February | 2025
With our earliest utterances, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as persons ready for social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death's embrace. In Bye Bye I Love You, linguist and author Michael Erard explores these phenomena (commonly called “first words” and “last words”), uncovering their cultural, historical, and biological entanglements and honoring their deep private significance. Erard draws from personal, historical, and anthropological sources to provide a sense of the breadth of beliefs and practices about these phenomena across eras, religions, and cultures around the world.
What do babies’ first words have in common? How do people really communicate at the end of life? In the first half of the book, Erard tells the story of first words in human development and evolution, and how the attention to the modern phenomenon of children’s early language arose. In the second half, he provides a groundbreaking overview of language at the end of life and the cultural conventions that surround it. Throughout, he reveals the many parallels and asymmetries between first and last words and poses whether we might be able to use a linguistic understanding of end of life to discover what we truly want.Translating the Science of Executive Function Using a Simplifying Model
Co-authors: Lynn Davey, Adam Simon and Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor | Framworks Institute | August | 2010
The text evaluates how explanatory metaphors can successfully bridge the gap between complex cognitive science and public understanding. Specifically, it highlights the “air traffic control” metaphor as a highly effective pedagogical tool to describe executive function—the mental processes including working memory, mental flexibility, and inhibitory control that allow individuals to manage multiple streams of information and regulate behavior. By reframing the prefrontal cortex’s role as a busy airport control tower managing incoming and outgoing planes, the model provides educators, policymakers, and parents with an accessible conceptual framework to understand child development, stress management, and foundational brain architecture.
Elsevier | September | 2021
Linguists study language and language use in a range of settings and populations, yet they have not studied language, interaction, and communication behaviors and functions of the dying. This article argues that they should, using an account of the death of Gregory Bateson to make concrete the questions that could be asked, then showing some of the theoretical and practical contributions that the answers might make. The goal of such an endeavor would be to respectfully contribute a linguistic perspective to a core and truly universal human experience.
Media by this author
Feature | April | 2026
What do people actually say at the end of life...and why do we expect something profound?
In this thoughtful talk from End Well 2025, linguist and author Michael Erard challenges our cultural fixation on “last words.” Drawing from research and his book, Bye Bye I Love You, he explores what really happens as language fades—and what remains when words do not. We often hope for clarity or meaning in someone’s final moments. But in reality, communication becomes fragmented or shifts beyond words entirely. Gestures, silence, and simple phrases can carry just as much connection.
Erard, whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Science, is based in the Netherlands at Radboud University and is training as an end-of-life doula. His perspective is shaped not just by research, but by a personal encounter that changed how he understands care at the end of life. Michael invites viewers to let go of the myth of the perfect final words, and to meet the end of life as it is: imperfect, quiet, and deeply human.Feature | May | 2012
Michael Erard visited Google to discuss his book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.
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