Public Biography
Dr. Patricia Olmstead is a sociolinguist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she holds the Elsa K. Lindgren Chair in American Regional Speech. Her research focuses on pronunciation as a marker of social identity, with particular emphasis on what she has termed “phonological tribalism” — the phenomenon by which communities enforce local pronunciation norms as a form of boundary maintenance.
Dr. Olmstead received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Michigan in 2009, with a dissertation titled Silent Letters as Social Contracts: French-Derived Toponyms in Anglophone North America. The dissertation, which ran to 412 pages and included a 90-page appendix cataloguing every municipality in the United States whose name contains a silent consonant, was later adapted into a widely cited paper in the Journal of Sociolinguistics and a less widely cited book, The Sounds We Don’t Make (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Her current research project, funded by a National Science Foundation grant, maps what she calls “pronunciation fault lines” — geographic boundaries across which the same place name is pronounced differently by residents on either side. She has identified over three hundred such fault lines in the continental United States, with the highest concentration in the Midwest, which she has described as “a minefield of silent consonants and swallowed vowels.”
Dr. Olmstead has been quoted in The New York Time5, The Atlantic, and NPR on matters of pronunciation, accent discrimination, and what she calls “the weaponization of the schwa.” She is a member of the Linguistic Society of America and serves on the editorial board of American Speech.
She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and pronounces it “correctly,” a qualifier she applies to approximately forty percent of the city’s residents.