The Language Beat

If you enjoy magazine articles about language topics, if you’re a budding journalist, or if you’re an academic who wants to see what writing for non-academic audiences builds to, THE LANGUAGE BEAT is for you.

More than two decades ago, Michael Erard, a linguist and writer, set out to marry the linguist’s fascination with language with the journalist’s fascination with story. Could he go beyond the usual cliches and engage with language where and how it’s actually lived?

In journalism, a “beat” is an area or topic to which a journalist brings their expertise. THE LANGUAGE BEAT: ESSAYS AND REPORTING ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE collects 42 of Erard’s long-form features, reports, essays and reviews that were originally published in The Atlantic, Aeon, Science, New Republic, Vice, Quartz, the European Review of Books, and other English-language publications. Also included are five unpublished pieces and six pitches to editors.

With his eye for story and commitment to accuracy, Erard paid deep, sustained attention to locating the human part of the language world and pulling out the language part of human lives. His articles are populated with rock musicians, language learners, bartenders, migrants, ministers and missionaries, politicians, babies, engineers, the occasional bonobo, and, of course, linguists. He reveals language in flux and ideas about language in conflict. Language is a tool for belonging; it’s a commodity; it’s an infrastructure; it’s an anchor in a sea of change (and a proxy for human dreams and fears); it’s a threat. THE LANGUAGE BEAT puts all of it on display.

Michael Erard has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of three previous books: Um…: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (Pantheon; 2007), Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press; 2012), and Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (MIT Press; 2025). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, American Speech, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other outlets. In 2016, the Linguistic Society of America recognized his media work and outreach on behalf of the discipline with the Language, Linguistics, and the Public Award. He has received funding from the Max Planck Society, the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sloan Foundation, and the Texas Institute of Letters.