Michael Erard

Trained as a linguist and historian, Michael Erard has spent more than two decades sharing compelling stories about language, languages, and the people who use and study them. He is the author of Um . . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners, which has been translated into eight languages. He is a researcher at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and is training to become an end-of-life doula.