Joe Salmons
Joe Salmons is a UW-Madison Language Sciences professor who specializes in Germanic languages. In this conversation, we talk about how his need to know the “why” led him to a career in linguistics, rather than philosophy, and how experiences of personal linguistic discrimination have informed his work. He talks about what it was like to write a book on the languages of Wisconsin and how community engagement talks led him to investigate the languages and language acquisition (or lack thereof) of earlier immigrants to the state.
Joe Salmons ist UW-Madison-Professor für Sprachwissenschaften, der sich auf germanische Sprachen spezialisiert. In diesem Gespräch sprechen wir darüber, wie sein Bedürfnis, das „Warum” zu wissen, ihn zu einer Karriere in der Linguistik und nicht in der Philosophie führte und wie die Erfahrungen mit persönlicher sprachlicher Diskriminierung seine Arbeit beeinflussten. Er redet darüber, wie es war, ein Buch über die Sprachen von Wisconsin zu schreiben, und wie Community-Engagement-Gespräche ihn dazu veranlassten, die Sprachen und den Spracherwerb (oder deren Fehlen) früherer Einwanderer in den Staat zu untersuchen.
“And that’s one of the things that we do in our outreach talks, and when we write for a broad public, and we do media interviews, is to try to get people to realize that, Oh, you think good English is a good thing? Well, no, actually, most of the rules that you’re thinking about are rules that were made up.”
Claire Darmstadter
Hey everybody, I am so lucky to be joined today by Joe Salmons, UW-Madison Language Sciences professor, thanks for taking a couple minutes to chat with me.
Joe Salmons
Happy to.
Claire Darmstadter
So it'd be great if you could first just give us a really general overview of your educational and linguistic background and how you arrived at your current position at UW.
Joe Salmons
Sure. I grew up in western North Carolina, speaking the dialect of that part of the country. And I went for undergraduate to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where I studied philosophy, and philosophy majors were expected to develop command of a couple of languages in which there's a lot of Western philosophy written. And I started with German and then picked up French. And when I was thinking about graduate school, I decided that the people who were really good at the kinds of philosophy I was interested in had really strong language skills. And so I decided I was going to go get a master's degree in German, keep working on my French, and then come back to philosophy. Well, I got to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. And one of the required courses for the master's degree was a history of the German language. And forever, I had been bugging teachers since taking Latin in high school. I'd been bugging teachers like, well, if it's like this in French, how come it's like this in English? Why is German like this and English is like that? And they weren't linguists and so they basically just said, the polite version of shut up kid and learn the paradigm. And in that class, from literally the first day, the professor was saying things like, You ever wonder why it's like this in German, and like this in English? Well, here's why. And it was the history of the language, understanding the history gave me answers to a zillion questions. And so that was it. I never went back to philosophy, although a lot of linguistics is pretty closely connected. So that's how, that's how I got there. I got a job at Purdue. And then was lucky enough to get a job in Madison. And I started out doing historical linguistics. And in Texas, not far from the University at Austin, an hour or two drive, there were lots of people who were native speakers of German, fourth, fifth, sixth generation Texans. And a professor said, Well, why don't you go out and record them. And so I did, and found that just amazing. And so kept doing that. So that's, that's how I got started. But I do a lot of phonology now. So speech sounds. And I still do a lot of historical, but I'm now doing it more with algonquian languages, the languages of the region, I mean, far beyond but languages of Wisconsin.
Claire Darmstadter
Yes, that was amazing. I had the exact same questions, and it's so easy to go down like a wormhole on YouTube to find the history of all these languages. So I agree, super fascinating. So not to date you, but you've been here a while. And I would imagine you have a pretty good knowledge of how the way we approach languages and how we study it has kind of evolved through the years. So are there any main characteristics that stand out to being different than maybe how we thought about things 20-30 years ago?
Joe Salmons
Yeah, everything. I think one of the important things, something is really huge for the work that almost all of my work is done with colleagues, and especially graduate students. So it's mostly co-authored and really collaborative. And one of the things that we talk about all the time is how the landscape has changed with regard to theory. When I was in graduate school, there were people who did formal theory. So Chomsky and MIT type stuff. And there were people who hated that from top to bottom. And it never made much sense. But today, at least, a lot of us have moved beyond that. So my work in phonology is very much formal, mostly generative phonology, but at the same time, I'm interested in variation like social variation. So we need and can have a formal description of what a sound system is like and how it works. But we also have to have an understanding of the social context and the historical context that that exists in. And when I was in graduate school, people talked about those things as if it was a religious war or something. And now, what we actually see is that not all the time and not for everybody, certainly, but for most of us, what we see is that these things complement one another. If you have a good understanding of variation and change that can inform your formal theory. If you have a good formal theory that can inform how you understand variation and then change. And so that's where a lot of my energy is going. And that's something that was just not really possible. Or it wasn't widely practiced when I was in graduate school, at least.
Claire Darmstadter
So you're involved in a lot of departments and groups, like you mentioned. But let's first start with Professor Salmons the author. So you're one of the co-authors of Wisconsin Talk, which came out just under a decade ago. So can you talk a little bit about the purpose of writing this book, how you contributed, and if there's any information that you think has drastically changed, or you'd like to kind of update since its release?
Joe Salmons
So yeah, you know, about the Wisconsin Idea, the notion that the university serves the state and the people of the state, and it doesn't just represent an academic enterprise. And I thought that was super cool when I came here. And I started going out and giving talks about language in Wisconsin. So I was working in part on varieties of German that were still spoken here, and got a little tiny grant to go around and give a bunch of talks across the state about the history of communities. So what dialects had been spoken, and when people shifted to English, and all sorts of things like that. And it was just amazing the amount of engagement, the interest that people had, there were places where we would get 50 or 100 people for a talk in towns that were 500 people, it was just ridiculous. And I just came to expect that I would talk for 45 minutes or something, and have an hour and a half of Q&A. And it was just so cool. And I learned so many things and did so much research based on stuff that I learned from those talks. And I saw such deep interest that we just decided we had to do something with it. And Tom Purnell came a while after me. And we started collaborating, not just on other languages like German, but on English spoken in the state, which is super cool, dramatically understudied, and awareness of it, some people like people from Sheboygan and Manitowoc will be really aware of, Oh, yeah, of course I have a Sheboygan accent! And other people will say I never knew I had an accent until I came to Madison and was around all these people who said from other states and said, Wow, you sound like you're from Wisconsin. And so we started doing lots more talks about that stuff. And it was just, it was just so much fun. And so we saw so much need for raising awareness of linguistic variation and linguistic diversity. And the project sort of grew out of that. Does it need to be updated? Well, a few years ago, I talked to the people at UW press and said, you know, is there any chance of doing a second edition? And they said, well, the book's still selling. So we really don't want to do a second edition. But like, a related volume would be cool. And we haven't done anything yet. But we need a related volume, because there's so much that we didn't do and so much has changed so dramatically since we did that book. But I think another piece of that book is part of how we think about our work at the university. You know, for faculty, we're sort of told that the world is divided into research and teaching and service. And so these outreach talks and stuff is service, and what we've come to understand is that if you're doing really interesting research, it should be tied to outreach and teaching. If you’re doing really interesting teaching, it should be tied to outreach and research and so on. And so all of those things really come together just constantly for this work. I'll give you a really concrete example, when we were doing talks about German, I was at a little tiny place in Dodge County giving a talk. And we got this question all the time. But this just like, stunned me the way it was asked this time. You know, you finish talking, say thank you, and hands go up in the audience. And I called on this old guy. And he said, You know, when my grandfather came to Manitowoc in 1887, and he learned English and didn't nobody help him. How come those Mexicans don't do that today? And I knew half of the answer to that question and the half of the question I could answer was, well actually people come to this country today and kill themselves to learn English they do. They learn it really fast, they do everything that's possible within human cognitive power and practical opportunity to learn English as fast as they can. But I realized at that moment and thought about it all the way back driving back to Madison, we don't know anything about when those Germans in Dodge County in Sheboygan County and so on, ever learned to speak English. And I had some money for a project assistant, and hired a super smart graduate student, Miranda Wilkerson. She's now a professor at Columbia College in Missouri, to work on a project. And when we sat down at the beginning of semester, to talk about the project, I said, you know, this is something that's always bugged me and I told her that story. And I knew from an article that had been published a few years earlier, that the 1910 US Census said, in question 17, “Whether able to speak English, if not give language spoken.” So what that tells you is that in the 1910 census for everybody, if they couldn't speak English, it says what language they could speak. Now, they were wrong about that all the time. You can't believe what they say all the time. So I live in the Greenbush in Madison. And in the 1910 census, there's a good community of people who are listed as monolingual Russian speakers. Well, it's really clear that they were not monolingual Russian speakers. They may have recorded Russian, but they were Yiddish speakers, it was really clear for what you know about the local history. And they for whatever reason, reported Russian. And in the same neighborhood, there are all these Italian speakers listed. But we know that a whole bunch of them spoke Arbëreshë, the Albanian varieties that are spoken in Eastern and Southern Italy. But they were, you know, they were seen by the rest of the community as Italians. And so they were listed as a Italian even if there's this other language. So we started looking at this stuff, and found out that in 1910, in some of these communities, 20 and 30% of the community could only speak German, or could only speak Polish. And these are not people who just arrived, these were people who'd been here 50 years, huge numbers of people who were born here, and lots of third generation people. So in Hustisford in Dodge County, and in Kiel and New Holstein, up further north. And for Polish in Sharon, Wisconsin, over near Stevens Point, there were lots of people whose grandparents had emigrated, and who were listed in 1910 as being monolingual speakers of Polish or monolingual, speakers of German. So that's turned into this really interesting line of research. A whole bunch of other people are working on it now with different communities with Finnish. And we've looked at some of the historical data on indigenous communities and so on. And that came, that whole thing grew out of a question that an old guy asked me after a talk. So that's kind of why that book matters so much in these different ways to me personally and to other people.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that's fascinating. And if people want to check it out, there's library copies available. There's so many ways to get your hands on this book. So I would very much recommend it. Can you talk a little bit about how you get involved with other groups on campus? Are there any professional organizations, informal or not, whether within UW or outside at different universities, how you kind of keep up to date with what's going on in the field?
Joe Salmons
Well, you know, when you get old enough, and you've been at it long enough, people start contacting you. And so I don't really have to, I don't have to look too hard most of the time to find collaborations. But when grad students come in to our program, or when I get into grad students in other departments, when students have promising ideas in classes, I mean, there's always this thing of and again, it's the link between teaching and outreach and research. There's always this opportunity. Hey, if you want to do something more with this paper, if you want to talk more about this topic you're interested in, we can do it and here's what we can do. Here's a grant we could get, here's a conference we could present at. Here's how we get you more data and so forth. And so they really grow organically from literally over coffee at conferences. Or people will, you know, you’ll drop somebody an email and say, Hey, do you know about x?, and they'll write back and say, You know, I don't but I've wondered about and here's what I've been wondering. So oh I can help you with that. And then you end up writing a paper. So it's almost inevitable. But you have to like working with people, of course, it's not the lonely scholar in the library, thinking great thoughts. I mean, it's much more organic. But we've built a lot. The Linguistic Society of America has gotten very involved in professionalization for students and sort of promoting collaboration. But we built a number of small scholarly societies, the Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas, and the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics and so forth. Just because we saw there were groups of us who were doing similar things and thinking in similar ways, and we wanted to have a chance to get together and talk. And so we do that. And, you know, it's really, it's one of the things that makes COVID much more bearable. So, you know, I can constantly be talking to and participating in reading groups with people, you know, really pretty much around the world at the drop of a hat. And so it's not hard.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah, for sure. And it's really easy sometimes, I think, to get stuck in our little academic bubble, where it's very supportive and appreciative of linguistic diversity. But looking at Madison as a city as a whole, would you say it's hospitable to individuals who speak more than one or a non-English language? Does it kind of depend on the language? Is Madison kind of different from other places you've lived in? What's kind of the vibe here?
Joe Salmons
I think that's an incredibly important question. And it's an incredibly, incredibly complicated question. So I live in sort of the edge of the old Greenbush, sort of this scene between downtown and South. I walk around my neighborhood, I can hear Hmong spoken, I can hear Spanish spoken. There are people who speak indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America. And, you know, there's people around who speak other immigrant languages. But it's, it's almost an individual to individual thing. I mean, there's a huge number of people who appreciate and value linguistic diversity and get why it is so important for us as a country and as a community. But I think there's also vast gaps in that. And I see this on campus, too. We've started a group, you know about it, Language Ideology and Linguistic Discrimination working group. And one of the things we're trying to do now is think about how we can raise awareness on campus. And some of it is the sort of obvious issues of people who speak other languages besides English. I mean, you know, it happens regularly in the city, that people are insulted and even attacked, because they're speaking a language other than English. A few years ago, if it wasn't so horrible, it would be a funny example, a Saturday night, a guy was walking down town, and was attacked and beaten up by two people for speaking Spanish. He was speaking Hebrew. If you've ever heard Hebrew spoken, and you've ever heard Spanish spoken, they don't sound at all alike. So I mean, you have that kind of like actual violence against people because of speaking other languages. And that's a piece of it. I mean, you know, about the anti-Asian racism that happened with the rise of COVID, and so forth. But there's a whole lot more. I mean, there's the whole standard language ideology that happens with English where people say, No, don't say between you and I, say between you and me. And actual discrimination based on how people talk, if somebody has an accent. African American speech is regularly discriminated against in the state and in the city, and on our campus, and all sorts of other things. I mean, I grew up with a very thick western North Carolina accent and I was laughed at in a job interview. It was half in German and half in English and we were speaking German and it was going really well. And they said, okay, there's a joke that they always make in language departments, they do the interviews, half and half. Okay, we have to make sure you speak the other language. And so they're switching into English. And I started speaking, and the chair of the committee started laughing. And I was like what? and he said, You speak German like that, and this is how you speak English? And the whole committee started laughing. I mean, obviously, I didn't want that job anymore in that moment. But that just shows you how far it goes, you know, obviously, he's a stupid hillbilly. And you get that stuff all over the place. So you get it with regard to prescriptive grammar, you get it with regard to other languages, you get it with regard to a lack of appreciation of the importance of indigenous languages in the state. But I think we have to sort of fight this battle individual by individual. And that's one of the things that we do in our outreach talks, and when we write for a broad public, and we do media interviews, is to try to get people to realize that, Oh, you think good English is a good thing? Well, no, actually, most of the rules that you're thinking about are rules that were made up. I mean, you know, the don't do double negatives, don't split infinitives, those are completely invented. They're just not how the language is supposed to work, you know, they're being twisted to work a certain way. And you know, that's fine. If you don't want to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions, knock yourself out. But when you start marking down students on papers, when you start making hiring decisions or promotion decisions, based on whether somebody says, We was real busy yesterday, which is utterly normal for me, in lots of contexts, then you got a problem. Or rather, we all have a problem. So I think you can't — there are probably regional concentrations, but I think if you just focus in just on UW Madison, it's a big problem here. As many people as are enlightened about it, and are working to change it, there's still huge problems present.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah, for sure. And I think that work you're doing is incredible and so important, like you said, and I would definitely listen to any TED talk that you could give, because this is all fascinating, but I'll let us end here. Thank you so much for everything that you're willing to share. And I hope you have a great rest of your school year.
Joe Salmons
Okay.
