The Deseret Alphabet was an experimental phonetic writing system created by 19th-century Latter-day Saint settlers to simplify English spelling, expand literacy, and express spiritual ideals. Developed collaboratively by Brigham Young, George D. Watt, and university regents using Isaac Pitman’s shorthand framework, its unconventional characters unexpectedly preserved a phonetic time capsule—capturing original Utah accents and period pronunciations. Although official publishing stalled after just four books, the script endures today through Unicode and artistic revival. In this interview, Ryan K. Shosted and N. E. Davis explore the history, dialect preservation, and modern resurgence of this unique script.
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Origins and Creation
— Developed in territorial Utah during the 1850s, the Deseret Alphabet was a collaborative phonetic project serving practical literacy, social reform, and spiritual goals.
What is the Deseret Alphabet?
The Deseret Alphabet is a phonetic and spiritually charged writing system developed by Mormon settlers in territorial Utah as early as 1850. Its formal dissemination to the public began in 1854. It uses an unconventional set of symbols to represent spoken language—especially English, but also other languages—more directly than conventional spelling.
Linguistically, it has features of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Nineteenth-century documents written in the alphabet can faithfully capture some aspects of how early Utahns actually spoke.
The alphabet’s unfamiliar appearance gives it an esoteric quality that has led generations to speculate on its origins and purpose.
What was the purpose of the Deseret Alphabet?
The Deseret Alphabet did not have a single, fixed purpose. It was intended to serve practical, social, and spiritual aims. However, the relative importance of those aims changed over the roughly 25 years during which the alphabet was actively developed and used.
Its practical purposes included expanding literacy, making reading more accessible, representing pronunciation more directly, and reducing the amount of type, paper, and ink required for mechanical printing.
Its social purposes included advancing the Mormon publication program and, in limited circumstances, making certain documents more difficult for casual readers to decipher.
Its spiritual purposes connected the alphabet to Mormon ideas about ancient writing, revealed language, the millennial reign of Christ, and the creation of a distinctive religious society that would ultimately be joined by Indigenous nations.
On a related note, the new alphabet was often presented as a means of making reading easier, especially for children, but the works Church leaders most wanted published in it were scriptural. It was therefore not only an educational reform but also a project of religious literacy and, more broadly, of social reform. Mormon leaders openly considered how exclusive instruction in the Deseret Alphabet might restrict what its readers—particularly children—could read, thereby shielding them from unwholesome printed material then entering the territory.
These purposes were articulated and operated across public, private, and semi-public spaces, and the boundaries among them shifted over time. Particularly by the twentieth century, the spiritual and metaphysical implications of the Deseret Alphabet had largely been shorn away, leaving a highly secularized account focusing on immigration and socialization.
Despite the breadth of its ambitions and frequent exhortation to its usage by Church leaders, including Church president Brigham Young, the Deseret Alphabet never gained enough popular acceptance to fully realize any of these goals.
Who created the Deseret Alphabet?
No surviving evidence identifies a single, undisputed creator of the Deseret Alphabet. No individual publicly claimed authorship, nor does any primary private source (e.g., a journal or letter written by a claimant) record such a claim. The earliest accounts instead attribute the project to the regents of the University of Deseret acting collectively and in close collaboration with Brigham Young.
Isaac Pitman, the British spelling reformer and developer of a popular shorthand system, must nevertheless be credited with providing the alphabet’s linguistic framework through his English Phonotypic Alphabet, which the Mormon orthographers studied closely. They departed from Pitman’s invention primarily in terms of what the characters looked like and the spiritual and social purposes for which their alphabet was to be deployed.
Isaac Pitman … must nevertheless be credited with providing the alphabet’s linguistic framework.
George D. Watt, one of Brigham Young’s secretaries, an expert in Isaac Pitman’s shorthand, and a stenographer for the regents of the University of Deseret, was credited with inventing the alphabet in secondary accounts dated to the early 1880s. This claim has been repeated frequently in the subsequent historiography of the alphabet. The earliest surviving, signed, and dated document in the Deseret Alphabet was indisputably written by George D. Watt.
It is not clear that Watt ever claimed authorship of the Deseret Alphabet or if it was only attributed to him retrospectively (thirty years later) based on a reminiscence of another party, and some time after Watt’s death.
William W. Phelps, a Church printer, language enthusiast, self-proclaimed “Lawyer in Israel,” and regent of the University of Deseret, presented a “Mormon Alphabet”—about which almost no detail survives—to the regents of the university in 1850. He was also identified as the inventor of the Deseret Alphabet in secondary sources published in 1861, much closer to the time of the alphabet’s creation, and during both Phelps’ and Watt’s lifetime. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Phelps privately claimed authorship of the alphabet as early as 1855, when the material for the first of these publications was collected, and that he continued to do so when he was interviewed for the second publication in 1860.
Our discovery of Watt’s March 1853 “Flour Note,” written in an early form of the script, demonstrates that some version of the Deseret Alphabet was already in active use before the relatively well-documented and ultimately decisive discussions about the alphabet that occurred in November and December 1853. Watt may have created or adapted the script used in the “Flour Note,” but on the other hand, Phelps may have devised an earlier version that Watt later employed. The minutes of the university regency are frustratingly unclear about the final stages of the Deseret Alphabet’s development, including its formal acceptance, even though the same minutes document with remarkable precision an earlier version. The earlier version was ultimately rejected but more visually similar to Pitman’s Phonotype, which we call the “Mormon Phonotypic Alphabet.”
The most accurate conclusion, therefore, is that the Deseret Alphabet first emerged from a collaborative and incompletely documented process involving George D. Watt, William W. Phelps, Brigham Young, and others who participated in the meetings of the regents of the University of Deseret from roughly 1850 to 1853. The alphabet’s single, original inventor—if there was one—remains unknown.
Influences and Linguistic History
— Built on 19th-century spelling reforms and Isaac Pitman’s phonotypic system, the script also reflected early Latter-day Saint theological interests in pure, sacred language.
What are some other examples of orthographic reform in the nineteenth century?
The best way to write English words has been contested ever since the Roman alphabet began competing with older forms of writing in the British Isles. Associating speech with written symbols is an exercise in arbitrariness. Moreover, pronunciation, the object which alphabetic symbols are supposed to represent, varies not only between individuals and regions but from generation to generation. This makes the proper spelling of words in a single language a perennial area of debate among literate people.
Because English spellings are particularly conservative and English embraces a wide variety of accents, the discrepancies are both apparent and frequently noted. In the nineteenth century, the falling costs of publication resulted in an explosion of print and a rise in literacy. Social and educational reformers of this era became interested in remodeling the inherited system of English spelling to facilitate education and communication.
History regards the winners of this effort as people like Noah Webster and his successors, who successfully standardized the American form of English words and convinced the reading public to purchase dictionaries and spelling guides in vast numbers. Not so famous anymore are people like Isaac Pitman and his brother Benn, who once oversaw a trans-Atlantic stenography empire and meanwhile tinkered ceaselessly with the English Phonotypic Alphabet. Andrew Comstock, Michael Hull Barton, Randall Prosser, and a host of other enthusiasts tried their hand at a similar enterprise. Even Benjamin Franklin experimented with phonetic writing before the American War of Independence.
Traditional spelling reform today has largely migrated to debates about the role of ‘phonics’—the explicit teaching of relationships between letters and sounds—in primary education. Questions of proper spelling, at least in formal, public-facing documents, have been rendered largely moot by the advent of electronic word-processing and spell-checkers.
How did Isaac Pitman influence the Deseret Alphabet?
Pitman’s work (in collaboration with Alexander Ellis) furnished, in large measure, the Deseret Alphabet’s underlying analysis of English sounds. The alphabet’s sound inventory was adapted from British phonetic reform; it was not invented in Utah or by the regents of the University of Deseret, though they did critique it in the context of their deliberations. Pitman also wrote extensively about the educational and economic arguments in favor of printing using his phonotype, and Mormon leaders repurposed at least some of that rationale in support of the Deseret Alphabet. By continually tinkering with his English Phonotypic Alphabet, Pitman also seems to have set an example for the Deseret Alphabet developers, who likewise altered the values and shapes of their characters until the alphabet’s final form was reached in the late 1860s.
The alphabet’s sound inventory was adapted from British phonetic reform; it was not invented in Utah.
How does the Deseret Alphabet relate to Joseph Smith’s pure language and translation projects?
The recovery, invention, or revelation of a pure language is a substantial topic in Western thought generally and in early Mormonism in particular.
Like many other religious thinkers, Joseph Smith was deeply interested in the hidden capacities and incapacities of language. This is something of a leitmotif in the Book of Mormon, where the prophets frequently mention the debility of their language, most often in writing. When he was particularly down-and-out, writing from Liberty Jail, Joseph bewailed the brokenness of language. Allusions to a supernatural language of insight that can accomplish changes in the material world and in the bodies of persons are found and celebrated throughout LDS scripture, ritual, and folklore.
Brigham Young gave continuation to these ideas in his musings about a language of angels that might not require words at all. Orson Pratt likewise considered how disembodied spirits might communicate with one another. Add to this Joseph Smith’s sustained interest in ancient, modern, and ostensible languages like “Reformed Egyptian”; the privileged position of the “seer,” whose authority rested in part on the ability to translate ancient records; Smith’s use of mediating instruments of translation such as the seer stone and the Urim and Thummim; the drama surrounding the Anthon Manuscript (cf. the surviving “Caractors” document, which might be related); and, later, the Lebolo mummies and the Egyptian papyri associated with the production of the Book of Abraham. Taken together, these elements place early Mormonism within an intellectual and religious world in which language, including its origins, fragmentation, recoverability, and divinely authorized powers of translation, occupied an unusually prominent position.
This has acquired still greater significance from the early Mormon acceptance of the Tower of Babel as a literal historical event, an account supplemented and corroborated within Mormon sacred history by the Jaredite mise en abyme (a nested or repeating structure in a story) found inside the Book of Mormon. There, the Book of Ether describes a people whose language was spared from the general confounding of tongues and who subsequently migrated to the Americas. Within early Mormon sacred logic, this raises the possibility that the language of the earliest explicitly recorded inhabitants of the Americas may have been the primordial “pure language” spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise.
Given all this, it comes as no surprise that the earliest discussions among the regents of the University of Deseret, beginning in 1850, concerned more than mere orthographic reform. Brigham Young and Willard Richards, in particular, both contemplated a more ambitious and esoterically charged project of linguistic transmutation. Young probably rejected W. W. Phelps’s initial proposal of a “Mormon Alphabet” not because he disliked its design but because a new alphabet on its own was insufficiently expansive for his purposes.
Over time, however, the aspiration of developing a pure language narrowed into the more practical project that ultimately became the Deseret Alphabet. Even in this reduced form, however, the new alphabet’s unfamiliar characters (some of which were deliberately chosen from arcane sources) must be read as a continuation, and in some ways the near-final efflorescence, of early Mormonism’s fascination with sacred language, linguistic recovery, and the possibility of transcending—or perfecting—ordinary human speech and writing.
Over time, however, the aspiration of developing a pure language narrowed.
Dialect Preservation
— Unedited Deseret Alphabet documents function as a phonetic time capsule, preserving 19th-century Utah dialects, regional accents, and early Latter-day Saint word pronunciations.
To what extent does the Deseret Alphabet preserve nineteenth-century Utah accents?
During the nineteenth century, the Deseret Alphabet was used by a relatively small number of people drawn from across the English-speaking world, including the northeastern and midwestern United States, England, Scotland, and British India. In some cases, their writing was heavily edited to conform to the pronunciation standards adopted in Dr. Webster’s Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1864), an unabridged dictionary containing extensive pronunciation guidance for every entry. The pronunciation prescribed in that volume arguably represented a kind of proto-standard dialect associated with New England and perhaps the mid-Atlantic states. A dictionary of Deseret Alphabet spellings was contemplated, and a rudimentary attempt was made to begin such a project, but it was never completed.
Considerable amounts of surviving Deseret Alphabet writing, however, were not edited and were presumably written without reference to a dictionary, plausibly reflecting the way individual writers themselves spoke. It is this material that is most likely to preserve the accents of nineteenth-century Utahns.
Even here, an important caveat is necessary: at most, only one known Deseret Alphabet scribe—Orson Pratt’s daughter Larinda—was born and raised in Utah during the territorial period, and any contributions she may have made to the surviving corpus are, moreover, unsigned. Every Deseret Alphabet scribe besides Larinda Pratt came from somewhere else and presumably brought a dialect of English with them to the Utah territory (or acquired it there, in the case of at least one Swedish migrant).
With those qualifications in mind, Deseret Alphabet documents preserve a variety of spellings suggestive of local and regional pronunciations, whether or not those pronunciations later became features of a distinctive—and now much diminished—Utah dialect.
The most commonly cited example is the merger of the words CORD and CARD, both pronounced like CARD, a well-documented feature of Utah English in the twentieth century. Subtle indications of this merger are preserved in Deseret Alphabet documents. The alphabet provided four separate signs for the vowels of GOAT, THOUGHT, LOT, and PALM, the last three of which are pronounced alike by modern Utahns and many other Americans, but were kept distinct by many nineteenth-century speakers of English. Writers of early Deseret Alphabet documents frequently used the LOT sign, and occasionally the PALM sign, to write words such as CORD, suggesting the pronunciation that later became associated with Utah English and eventually with local dialect humor, as in the Utah city name “Spanish Fark” or the comic epiplexis “Were you barn in a barn?” It has sometimes been suggested that the Deseret Alphabet itself caused this pronunciation, but this is far-fetched. The merger of CORD and CARD words was more likely brought to Utah by speakers of other English dialects (possibly from western Illinois); the Deseret Alphabet simply gave them a way to represent it in writing.
Similarly, scribes’ choice of characters suggests that some speakers merged words such as LOIN and LINE, pronouncing both like LINE. Some unidentified scribes, presumably English, occasionally dropped initial h, as in aughty for haughty. Even the heavily edited Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon of 1869 preserves a pronunciation of massacred resembling mass-a-creed (similarly, Wilford Woodruff, unedited, wrote something resembling mass-eh-crih for massacre). Because that pronunciation was not licensed by Webster’s 1864 dictionary, it is likely to reflect a dialect feature of the principal editor of the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon, Orson Pratt.
What are some examples of Mormon-specific words that were pronounced differently in the nineteenth century than they are today?
Novel words that could not be found in Webster’s 1864 dictionary, or in any other contemporary dictionary, provide some of the most interesting evidence for how the Deseret Alphabet might bring us closer to the spoken word of nineteenth-century Mormonism.
Deseret Alphabet writers and editors such as Wilford Woodruff and Orson Pratt were doubtless familiar with the way Joseph Smith Jr. pronounced distinctive Book of Mormon names such as Cumorah, and they probably cared about preserving those pronunciations in writing. In Pratt’s spelling, for example, the first syllable of Cumorah sounds like the word cue. Given Pratt’s meticulous editing of the 1869 Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon and the remarkable internal consistency of its spellings, very few of Pratt’s forms are likely to have been accidental, particularly when the same spelling appears more than once in the book. Likely, Pratt cared deeply about preserving what he understood to be the correct pronunciations, perhaps even the original pronunciations of the 1830s.
In several cases, the pronunciations represented in the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon differ from those commonly heard in the American Church today, and even from those given in the Church’s modern pronunciation guide to the Book of Mormon—which, as of 2013, distances itself from being an “authoritative source” for the original pronunciation of the text’s novel words. Additional examples from the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon include lye-ay-hoh-nah for Liahona and deh-see-ret for Deseret.
The Doctrine and Covenants was never published in the Deseret Alphabet, but it was fully transcribed in manuscript under the supervision of Orson Pratt. These manuscripts preserve still more examples of novel Mormon words, including pronunciations of the “code names” for early Latter-day Saint leaders, places, and activities that appeared in older editions of the Doctrine and Covenants. For example, the code name shinelane—meaning “printing office”—was pronounced something like shy-nee-layn.
Adoption and Decline
— Promoted by Church leaders, the Deseret Alphabet saw limited classroom use and only four published books before financial losses and fading interest led to its 1877 abandonment.
Who were the most ardent supporters of the Deseret Alphabet?
A considerable number of the Church’s general authorities were connected to the Deseret Alphabet in some way, although often only briefly or for a closely circumscribed task. Among them, Church president Brigham Young and apostle and First Presidency member George A. Smith are notable for repeatedly using the pulpit to encourage the adoption of the new alphabet.
As Church Historian, George A. Smith was likely the figure responsible for directing his clerks to keep the Church’s history in the Deseret Alphabet, an instruction they followed sporadically. Parley P. Pratt gave an early talk introducing the alphabet to the public. His brother Orson became involved during the later stages of its deployment, particularly during the important publication period of 1868–69, when he undertook the monumental task of proofreading the printer’s first draft of the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon.
Several lesser-known individuals also played important roles in the alphabet’s deployment. These included George D. Watt, who gave multiple lectures regarding the alphabet in its early days; William W. Phelps who published the key to the alphabet in his Deseret Almanac; Robert Lang Campbell, superintendent of Utah’s territorial schools, who toured the region encouraging the alphabet’s adoption; Marion J. Shelton, a clerk in the Church Historian’s office, as well as a schoolteacher and a missionary to the Hopi nation (more on his mission thence here); Annie Smith, an orphan from British India who transcribed the New Testament and other documents into the Deseret Alphabet for her patron and adoptive father, Orson Pratt; David O. Calder, who managed the initial business dealings with Russell Bros. in New York City that made the publications of 1868 and 1869 possible; and many others.
On the other side of the coin, George D. Watt was frequently critical of the alphabet’s design, suggesting either that he had become dissatisfied with his own earlier work or that he was criticizing the work of someone else. Apostle George Q. Cannon presents a similarly complicated case. Although he occasionally wrote in favor of the alphabet, Cannon appears to have persuaded Brigham Young to abandon it in favor of Pitman’s phonotype shortly before Young died in 1877; this was followed by the termination of spelling reform as a Church program.
What books were printed in the Deseret Alphabet during the 1800s?
Only four books were printed in the Deseret Alphabet during the nineteenth century, all in rapid succession between 1868 and 1869. This sudden late interest appears to be motivated by the coming of the railroad and a desire to preserve Mormon distinctiveness. In 1868, the Church contracted with Russell Bros., a publishing house in New York City, to manufacture Deseret Alphabet type and print two graded readers for school children: the Deseret First Book and the Deseret Second Book. Both contained simple lessons directed primarily to a younger audience. Little of their content was explicitly or uniquely Mormon, although some passages were devotional in nature. Many thousands of copies were printed, but very few were sold. Some resurfaced on the Salt Lake City rare book market in the 1970s, directly stimulating modern interest in the Deseret Alphabet as a medium of artistic and intellectual expression. Large numbers of these books remain in the collections of the University of Utah, which inherited them as the institutional successor to the University of Deseret.
In 1869, the Book of Mormon appeared in two Deseret Alphabet editions. The first was a partial edition containing the material corresponding to the Small Plates of Nephi, from First Nephi through Words of Mormon. The second was a complete edition containing all of the constituent books of the Book of Mormon, along with its typical prefatory material. Only 500 copies of the complete edition were printed, and relatively few survive today.
The publications of 1868 to 1869 attest to the Church’s expanding network of professional and commercial relationships, its ability to secure and leverage credit, and its capacity to conduct business with firms in distant cities. It also demonstrates the considerable institutional commitment devoted to the Deseret Alphabet project, both in financial resources and in the time and labor required to bring the books to print.
How was the Deseret Alphabet taught in early Utah schools, and what was the impact on the students?
There is an abundant record of Church leaders admonishing teachers to use the alphabet, which suggests that many teachers were reluctant to do so. There are also public notices advertising lectures on the Deseret Alphabet, along with references to teachers using it and to classes in which it was taught. Cards bearing a key to the alphabet were printed and sold and may have served as the principal means of instruction until the Deseret News began publishing the key together with short excerpts from scripture in 1859. These newspaper materials were likely used for pedagogical purposes by those who had access to them.
The most clearly pedagogical texts were the Deseret First Book and Deseret Second Book, both published in 1868. These were plainly intended as graded readers for classroom use. Like comparable schoolbooks of the period, they typically featured narratives of one or two paragraphs describing the adventures of children and the vicissitudes of frontier life. Despite being designed for this particular audience, however, sales figures and the large number of unsold textbooks discovered in archives during the twentieth century suggest that relatively few copies of the First Book or Second Book were actually sold or distributed throughout the territory. There are nevertheless indications that the Deseret Alphabet was taught in Great Salt Lake City and Tooele, throughout Utah Valley, as well as in Parowan and Cedar City.
Critics of the alphabet quickly pointed out the deleterious effects of teaching the Deseret Alphabet to the exclusion of the Roman alphabet, since doing so could limit children’s ability to read literature printed or written in traditional forms. This was a source of considerable frustration for non-Mormon residents of Utah Territory and likely for some otherwise faithful Latter-day Saints, as well. Later accounts even suggest that some individuals who learned the Deseret Alphabet during their precious few days in a territorial schoolhouse remained functionally illiterate in regularly written English for the rest of their lives.
Why did use of the Deseret Alphabet fall into decline?
While use of the alphabet did decline, we do not conclude that the Deseret Alphabet failed. Its modern use suggests that it remains a powerful marker of identity for Mormon communities and a functional script that can be employed across a variety of domains and even across linguistic boundaries. We do acknowledge, however, that most of its originally intended purposes were either elided or transformed over the course of the nineteenth century. By 1877, the alphabet had been largely abandoned, if not forgotten, for several reasons.
First and most importantly, even Brigham Young regarded it as no more than “a step and partial return” toward the language of Adam and/or a revealed millennial language. Without the advent of that new language, the script intended to write it became increasingly vestigial, and its former significance became less and less legible to successive generations. As eschatological matters became of less interest to Church leaders, so too did the spiritual purposes of the new alphabet. Bereft of its spiritual marrow, the alphabet withered. Preaching on the spiritual dimensions of the alphabet was confined primarily to Brigham Young and George A. Smith. Although Orson Pratt had ample opportunity to address the subject, and a demonstrable interest in the idea of perfect language, he never publicly equated the Deseret Alphabet with prophecy or with doctrines concerning a perfect language. This omission may speak to his regard for the alphabet as an inspired instrument.
At the same time, as printing materials became less scarce with the economic expansion of Utah Territory in the late 1860s and 1870s, the Deseret Alphabet increasingly became a solution in search of a problem. Popular enthusiasm for it was never particularly high. (One can imagine a frontier reader of the Deseret News idly picking through a Deseret Alphabet scripture passage like a sort of cryptoquip puzzle rather than a serious reading project.)
The Deseret Alphabet increasingly became a solution in search of a problem.
On purely economic terms, the investment in the publications of 1868–69 was an abject failure, resulting in real losses to the project’s funders. Market imperatives were therefore very likely at work when Brigham Young was finally persuaded to abandon the Deseret Alphabet in favor of the English Phonotypic Alphabet in 1877. Young died only a few months after making that decision, at which point orthographic reform was dropped altogether as a Church-sponsored project.
Modern Legacy
— Today, the Deseret Alphabet survives as a flexible symbol of heritage, revitalized by scholars, artists, and digital communities following its integration into Unicode.
Is the Deseret Alphabet still used today?
Yes. The Deseret Alphabet was never lost or forgotten, although each generation seems to rediscover it like an ever-returning buried treasure, repeatedly unearthed and then, in a sense, buried again. Intellectuals, writers, artists, and provocateurs have continued to study and use the Deseret Alphabet, and it now has a substantial online presence, thanks to the computer scientists who secured its inclusion in Unicode. The late John H. Jenkins published a series of public-domain works, along with some of his own original writing, in the alphabet; contemporary Mormon artists incorporate it into their work; and modern users relish it as a symbol of Mormon and/or Utah historical and cultural distinctiveness. What was once proposed as an infrastructure for a society has become an apochoric cultural sign of that society—and, increasingly, of its remnant. The modern symbolic effectiveness of the Deseret Alphabet may depend on its having outlived its original matrix of practical and social purposes.
Because no one owns the alphabet and because the Church neither sanctions nor condemns it, the Deseret Alphabet remains ideologically flexible. Anyone can write with it—anything that they want— and so they do. The Deseret Alphabet is not closely tied to any particular polemic of Church history, so users across a wide range of positions and perspectives feel at liberty to adapt it to their own purposes, from wood-burned gourds to pop art to typography to video games. When it resurfaces in modern, official Church publications, the Deseret Alphabet is often featured as juvenilia. Others treat it more seriously.
Current scholarly and artistic projects are supporting its revival, and the Deseret Alphabet is making an appearance at places as diverse as the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, art galleries, and online communities gathering on platforms like X and Tumblr.
New scholarly resources include our text-searchable collection of nineteenth-century documents, including the first full, digital transcription of the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon (1869); a comparative historical lexicon; and tools intended to help people learn, explore, and write in the alphabet.
Its modern use is not merely historical preservation or salvage; it is a form of linguistic and cultural revitalization. We argue that the Deseret Alphabet has a future as a viable and even robust medium of written and graphic expression, in Mormon country and beyond.
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About the Scholar
Ryan K. Shosted is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-author of The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound. He specializes in phonetics, speech acoustics, and dialectology, examining how spoken language is structured across diverse regional accents and historical periods. His linguistic research includes co-founding the Illinois Deseret Consortium to analyze primary nineteenth-century manuscripts and record how early Utah settlers actually spoke. Holding a PhD in Linguistics from UC Berkeley, Shosted has published extensively on acoustic phonetics, experimental linguistics, and orthographic reform movements. His phonetic analysis provides critical insight into how unedited Deseret Alphabet documents function as a unique historical record of early Latter-day Saint speech patterns.
N. E. Davis is a computer science teaching faculty member and software designer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work bridges digital humanities, high-performance computing, and optical character recognition, focusing on computational tools that make historical texts accessible. He co-founded the Illinois Deseret Consortium and developed open-source digital tools, web fonts, and OCR software to digitize rare nineteenth-century print editions. With an extensive background in computational science and language design, Davis has created digital corpora that enable researchers to search and analyze complex historical scripts. His computational perspective highlights how digital transcription and web standardization have transformed the Deseret Alphabet from an obscure historical experiment into an accessible research resource.
Further Reading
Explore more From the Desk articles about Latter-day Saints’ fascination with language
- Who Was Brigham Young?
- The Pure Language Project and the Book of Abraham
- Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in the Book of Abraham
- Read George D. Watt’s 1851 Journal From Liverpool to Chimney Rock for the First Time
- Why Did Wilford Woodruff Use Symbols in His Journal?
Deseret Alphabet
Read what top scholars and publishers say about the Deseret Alphabet:
- The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound (University of Illinois Press)
- A Review: The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound (Times and Seasons)
- Discover the Deseret Alphabet (The Illinois Deseret Consortium)
- Say Now Shibboleth, or Maybe Cumorah (Interpreter)
