The Deseret Alphabet is often dismissed today as a quirky historical footnote, a strange linguistic experiment championed by Brigham Young that ultimately failed to take root in the Utah desert. However, a closer look at this 19th-century phonetic writing system reveals a complex project driven by practical literacy, social control, and profound spiritual ambition. A fascinating new interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, features scholars Ryan K. Shosted and N. E. Davis, who unpack the origins, purpose, and legacy of this unique script. Exploring newly discovered documents, the collaborative (and sometimes contentious) nature of its creation, and its surprising ability to act as a linguistic “time capsule,” Shosted and Davis reveal how the Deseret Alphabet was designed not just to reform spelling, but to spiritually and culturally insulate a pioneer society preparing for the Millennium.
A Tri-Fold Purpose
Developed in territorial Utah during the early 1850s, the Deseret Alphabet utilized an unconventional set of symbols to represent spoken English phonetically. As Shosted and Davis explain, the alphabet did not have a single, fixed purpose, but was instead driven by practical, social, and spiritual aims.
Practically, the alphabet was meant to make reading more accessible for uneducated converts and to reduce the amount of type, ink, and paper required for mechanical printing. Spiritually, the project was deeply intertwined with Latter-day Saint theology.
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.
Interestingly, there was also an element of social insulation built into the project. As the railroad brought more outsiders to Utah, Church leaders openly considered how teaching children to read exclusively in the Deseret Alphabet could act as a cultural firewall, effectively shielding the rising generation from the “unwholesome printed material” beginning to flood into the territory.
British Roots and Collaborative Origins
While secondary accounts from the 1880s frequently credited Brigham Young’s secretary, George D. Watt, as the sole inventor of the alphabet, Shosted and Davis emphasize that the project was highly collaborative.
The linguistic framework of the alphabet was not actually invented in Utah. It was heavily adapted from Isaac Pitman’s English Phonotypic Alphabet, a British shorthand system that Latter-day Saint orthographers studied closely. The translation of Pitman’s framework into the esoteric symbols of the Deseret Alphabet was hammered out over years of debate between Watt, Brigham Young, William W. Phelps, and the regents of the University of Deseret.
The researchers highlight a key historical breakthrough regarding this timeline: the discovery of George D. Watt’s March 1853 “Flour Note.” This slip of paper is currently the earliest surviving, signed, and dated document written in the script, demonstrating that a working version of the alphabet was already in active use months before the official, decisive board of regents meetings occurred late in the year.
A Phonetic Time Capsule
Ultimately, the Deseret Alphabet proved too expensive and cumbersome to maintain. Only four official books were ever published in the script before the project quietly stalled out in the 1870s. However, Shosted and Davis point out that the alphabet left behind a remarkable, unintended legacy for modern historians and linguists.
Because the system was strictly phonetic, writers who were not working on a book with the intent to publish spelled words exactly as they sounded when spoken aloud. Today, 19th-century journals and records written in the Deseret Alphabet act as a “phonetic time capsule,” allowing researchers to faithfully reconstruct the original accents, dialects, and pronunciations of early Utahns.
For more insights on the linguistic mechanics of the Deseret Alphabet, its surprising modern revival in Unicode, and how 20th-century historians secularized the narrative by stripping away its millennial goals, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, to read the full interview.
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