Joe Salmons is the Lester W.J. "Smoky" Seifert Professor of Germanic Linguistics at UW–Madison and is the co-founder of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures. He is author of A History of German: What the past reveals about today’s language (Oxford, 2012), editor of Diachronica: International journal for historical linguistics, and co-editor with Tom Purnell and Eric Raimy of Wisconsin Talk: Linguistic Diversity in the Badger State. His work focuses on language change in the context of linguistic theory, drawing data especially from Germanic languages, including American English and heritage languages spoken in the US.