Mama. I love you. Thank you. Oh wow.
Article continues after advertisement
With our earliest utterances and gestures, we announce ourselves—and are recognized—as persons ready to participate in social life. With our final ones, we mark where others must release us to death’s embrace. Language scientists 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 as part of the same continuum.
It’s easy to assume that people, across cultures and eras, have found first and last words interesting for the same reasons, mainly that we all learn language and we all die. Despite these universal experiences, it turns out that people don’t possess the same expectations about the linguistic behaviors that mark the beginning and end of the signifying self. Across cultures and historical eras, those behaviors are framed in many different ways. This book is, in part, an attempt to capture and explain that range, so that you might situate yourself, where you come from, what you desire.
Such a starting point seems to commit me to aggregating cute stories about the toddler’s first words, mixing them with emblematic stories of wise words from the lips of the dying. But I see quite a few more possibilities.
Our first and last words…shed light on practices and beliefs about babies, the dying, language itself, and the very nature of existence.
In fact, our first and last words are culturally significant beyond the anecdotal. They shed light on practices and beliefs about babies, the dying, language itself, and the very nature of existence. As personal, anthropological, and historical accounts show, first words and last words have been connected to a cornucopia of ideas and beliefs, from the sweet to the serious. They tell us that a baby learns to talk when a god helps it or after it eats corn, or that parents eagerly anticipate their baby’s first words, or that a first word should only be the first utterance that has the form of an adult’s, or that it’s always “shit!,” or that it makes for a good tale.
They tell a story about dying as well: that a dying person must have a prayer or a god’s name on their lips when they expire, or that they always tell the truth, or that a person need only say “yes,” or that they should abstain from pain relief so that they can speak lucidly, or that some last words are inevitable—one should not, under any circumstances, greet that dark night in silence—or even that babbling by infants and by the elderly amount to the same language of the spirit world. Or that neither matter at all.
When I surveyed these beliefs, I found a tremendous variety in how the firstness and lastness of these moments get treated. Even their “wordness” is up for debate. I began to see that only certain behaviors undergo cultural transformation. Moreover, only certain transformations occur. All of this variety is bound up in family behavior, parenting, education, medical care, grief, and even the structure of daily life. Here the groups for whom I’ve written this book—families, caregivers, medical professionals, chaplains and social workers, linguistic scholars, and memoirists, among others—will find their needs and experiences reflected.
Yet my goal isn’t to pull down anyone’s myths and rituals. Rather, I aim to lay out the full panoply of what it might be possible to believe alongside a description of all that occurs, so that we might understand better our experiences of the beginning and end of language and perhaps revise our ways of doing things to be better suited to our needs and hew closer to what’s enduring and true. Doing so requires something of a reset, one that’s drawn from historical understandings and, above all, the language sciences. Only then can we find real opportunities to make different decisions about what the right thing is to do.
*
When you take first and last words together, it immediately becomes obvious that they can both be freighted with more than words usually bear. As the Austrian writer Karl Kraus once wrote, “The closer one looks at a word, the farther away the distance from which the word looks back.” Here this adage seems particularly true.
What is the first word of a baby? It’s an inheritance of the species, bestowed by the community. It’s not the seed of language but its sprout, which has already sought the warm light of interaction. What is the last word of a dying person? It amounts to some final articulation of consciousness (and not just a word, by the way) that passes through a closing window of interaction. What I mean here will unfold in the coming pages. Language at the end of life is so much more than a diminishment. Yes, it’s a debris of language, a rubble of interactive abilities and expressive behaviors. But it also puts on display what has sustained an individual’s language powers from the beginning—even before their first word. And so the circle is complete.
As I explored these topics, many other themes and symmetries became apparent. In cultures where first and last words are associated with existential significance, they activate rituals and other recipes that people bring to bear on encounters with mysterious boundaries. This need coexists with—and sometimes crashes against—that demand of modernity that people apprehend things as they really are, even if courage is required for facing naked truths. When you read this cultural history of first and last words, you’ll see a glimpse of how these two forces have been threaded together over many centuries—and what we have inherited.
Another theme is that people don’t live their own first or last words in a manner that they can reflect on—the self that’s bookended by these moments is unable to directly access them and will not be judged by them. The dead can’t feel embarrassment for what they did or didn’t utter; a baby can, but not in the moment. No matter what linguistic talents you might develop in your lifetime, they’ll begin and end without the you who claims them. This makes first and last words utterly personal but also strangely alien, as much for the person who produces them as for whomever is lucky enough to be entrusted with such weighty existential cargo.
There are also persistent frictions between the private and public dimensions of first and last words: what they mean, and to whom, in which intimate or public spheres, and how the traffic between them runs. One such friction is that the public versions of first and last words, as cultural ideals, can serve as models for behaving in private that may be frustratingly unattainable. There’s an ethic of privacy that surrounds the moments in which first and last words appear, one that’s accompanied by a desire (and sometimes a need) to transform them into memorials, slogans, inputs for artistic and scientific projects, and other public purposes. (It occurs to me to playfully offer that one reason linguistics doesn’t tackle last words is because the scientific discipline must repay a cosmic debt accrued by exposing so many first ones to public view. But it’s probably due to the simple fact that linguists are people, too, wanting to process the loss of loved ones like everyone else. Even linguistic curiosity has its limits.)
Then there’s the way that this public-private tension contrasts with the simple but far more predominant reality that the vast majority of humanity’s first and final articulations of consciousness have been uttered to a void and lost to time—washed away, as the cyborg Roy Batty says at the end of Blade Runner, like tears in rain. Part of me wants to imagine a god of the puckerbrush, whose divinely capacious perception can’t let a single articulation of consciousness slip by, whether they happen in the royal bedroom or the slum. Yet even the notion that these are sacred moments is itself a belief about them—which demonstrates a bit of what’s difficult about holding first and last words at the proper distance to understand better how one might hold them close.
“Last words” has long been a distinct literary genre—a directly quoted utterance that is a “final, self-validating articulation of consciousness in extremis,” according to Karl Guthke, a scholar who wrote the authoritative work on the genre. Realistic and dramatized portrayals of such expressions abound in the media, films, music, literature, and pop culture of modern North America, Europe, and elsewhere. They’ve been collected and published in multiple languages, often as distillations of longer deathbed scenes. (From Guthke’s book I learned that “last words” is a category in the US Library of Congress classification scheme.) Such anthologies reflect prevailing ideas about gender; in European anthologies, the only women are either royalty or religious figures.
Often the real meaning of last words is most available when you appreciate how they’re embedded in private lives. Poignant stories are often treasured by family members, where they are elements of a tool kit for grieving. A woman told me that her Dutch-speaking grandmother inexplicably said, in English, “I go,” before collapsing. Not getting to share last words with someone can be a lasting regret. A man’s dying grandmother wanted to tell him something but her mouth was too dry. “Four times she tried to say it,” he told me, then paused, a bit wistful. “I wish I knew what she wanted to say.” And sometimes people find meaning in a mere semblance of a last word. As a man held his dying wife’s hand, he told her he’d be okay, that he’d meet her again someday, and when she moved her lips soundlessly, as if in response, it seemed to comfort him when he remembered it. She’d heard him; she knew.
*
By contrast, first words have the scantest of public lives, real or imagined. Beyond the realm of science and scientists, they appear mainly in narrow cultural niches, like celebrity memoirs (we learn from singer Julie Andrews that her first word was “home”), parenting blogs, and a few sitcoms—Bart Simpson’s first words, upon discovering his parents in bed, became his catchphrase, “Ay caramba!”
When you look at first and last words together, you catch glimpses of other cultural decisions that shape what we make of our lives with language.
Cute sayings by older kids have long entertained family get-togethers and social media lurkers. But first word-iness is little discussed, nor is the first word as a cultural symptom, even though, as linguists assure us, everyone has first words. Yet they’re not attributed to animals and machines; there’s no library classification that pairs them with last ones. A quiz about famous first words would be futile. Even Guthke, in his encyclopedia of famous last words, discounts the first ones. He wrote that they “belong with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” His ire was provoked by 1988 US Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s reported first words, in Greek, monos mou, or “all by myself,” which foreshadowed Dukakis’s reputation as a technocrat.
What’s going on here? Do we indeed care about entrances, beginnings, the new? The reason, as Guthke saw, isn’t complicated: Most first words lack glamor and drama. There’s nothing to chew on. You can’t really use them to distinguish one kid from another—they’re not monumental. They don’t make history.
But leave it to the language sciences, with their extensive studies of infants acquiring vocabulary and grammar, to produce fascinating insights about groups of first words, such as when they emerge and what they tend to be about. In so doing, they divulge secrets about the lives of young human selves, most reliably if those selves come from wealthy, Anglophone societies. For instance, if the emergence of the signifying self is interesting to you, then you should know that the baby’s first point may be more unambiguous fruit than a signed or uttered first word. There’s also the theory that language evolved in many places, the so-called “polygenetic theory.”
One implication is that there’s no single first first word for the human species to hang its humanity on, but plausibly millions of them. Think about it: our language lives don’t trace back to a single Adam-and-Eve-like word (apple? snake? darn!) but to a bounteous, and probably sloppy, squall. No matter the words themselves, in each of those millions of instances they likely arose through the interactions of caregivers and offspring.
To me, this is only the beginning of a story about why humans notice, remember, record, and memorialize first words. The answer isn’t so simple, for there’s a surprising diversity to what adults make of early language, even though—this is important—virtually all children end up skilled users of their community’s languages. All of this is covered in the first half of this book, which connects every baby’s first word to an expansive evolutionary and cultural legacy, whether that word is signed or spoken, on time or late, noticed or overlooked. First words may not make history, but they’re bound up with it. They also make a human place in it. I propose that over the longer term of language history, people have developed an anxiety about time’s passage and where they fit, an anxiety whose revelatory symptom is a fascination with children’s first words.
And when you look at first and last words together, you catch glimpses of other cultural decisions that shape what we make of our lives with language.
__________________________________
From Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words by Michael Erard. Copyright © 2025. Available from MIT Press.
