Soon after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved its headquarters from Nauvoo, Illinois toward what became the Utah Territory, church president Brigham Young launched a striking experiment: an alphabet designed to make English more phonetically precise while also reconnecting writing with what early Latter-day Saint leaders regarded as the “pure language” of God.
The project drew attention in the mid-19th century, during an era when spelling reform was actively debated across the United States and Europe. Yet the Deseret Alphabet—named for a term associated with the Saints’ homeland—was adopted only briefly and never achieved broad mainstream acceptance. A new book now reconstructs why it mattered enough for believers to attempt it amid hardship.
Published by the University of Illinois Press, The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound presents the first dedicated full-length account of the alphabet’s development, deployment, and cultural afterlife. The authors, Ryan Shosted, a linguistics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and computer language designer Neal Davis, a former Illinois computer science professor, argue that the strongest motivations were theological rather than merely linguistic.
Their analysis frames language as a kind of spiritual technology: early texts within the movement suggested that language is “fallen” and requires repair. In that worldview, the alphabet becomes part of a broader “restoration” agenda—one aimed at preparing believers for an anticipated future, not just improving literacy efficiency.
The book also situates the alphabet within practical constraints. Church communities faced shortages of paper and ink, leading them to build a paper mill and collect rags. Spelling reform was expected to reduce printing costs, while educators hoped a systematic phonetic script would support teaching English to children and to immigrants in the Great Basin.
Shosted and Davis further connect the Deseret script to surprising historical threads. They trace competing claims about inventorship, identify the earliest known Deseret-written document, and discuss a supposed link to a Welsh druidic alphabet. According to the authors, documents written in Deseret were even brought to Hopi communities in northern Arizona to test whether its Welsh-derived character might aid reading. They report that Hopi language was written in Deseret for the first time through this effort.
While critics accused the Saints of using the alphabet to conceal information, the authors contend that concealment episodes are negligible compared with the overall written corpus. By the 1860s, key information about the script had already been widely circulated, weakening the secrecy argument.
Today, the Deseret Alphabet’s most visible use is among enthusiasts and digital creators, including artists, text-based game developers, and publishers of classic novels in the script. Importantly, modern computing infrastructure has changed the equation: the alphabet is encoded in Unicode, and digital fonts enable consistent rendering across platforms.
To make research more scalable, the authors built the Illinois Deseret Consortium research archive, which provides searchable transcriptions of Deseret texts. The resource catalogs thousands of lexical entries with spelling variants and has published a 1869 Deseret-language Book of Mormon transcription that is fully text-searchable.
Subject of Research: Deseret Alphabet (phonetic script history, language restoration, digital encoding)
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Web References: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089428 ; https://www.press.uillinois.edu/ ; https://linguistics.illinois.edu/ ; http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/rshosted/deseret.html
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Image Credits: Photo by Michelle Hassel; book cover courtesy Ryan Shosted and Neal Davis.
Keywords: Deseret Alphabet, phonetic writing, spelling reform, Latter-day Saints, Unicode, historical linguistics, digital humanities
