If you were a schoolchild in the Utah Territory during the 1860s, your literacy lessons might have looked very different from the “A-B-Cs” taught in the rest of America. Instead of the standard Latin alphabet, you might have been staring at a script that looked like a strange hybrid of Runes, Pitman shorthand, and loops—a writing system where the word “bound” and “bowed” were completely distinct, and where spelling bees were theoretically impossible to lose.
You would have been studying the Deseret Alphabet, one of history’s most audacious linguistic experiments. Initiated by Brigham Young and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), this was not merely a new font; it was a complete orthographic overhaul aimed at fixing the chaotic inconsistencies of the English language. While it ultimately ended as a historical footnote, the Deseret Alphabet provides a fascinating case study in sociolinguistics, phonetic theory, and the immense difficulty of changing how a society writes.
The Problem: The Chaos of English Orthography
To understand why a group of pioneers fighting for survival in the high desert would bother reinventing the alphabet, one must first look at the English language itself. From a linguistic perspective, English spelling is a disaster.
Thanks to a complex history involving the Great Vowel Shift, Norman conquests, and the standardization of spelling before sound changes had settled, English is notoriously “opaque.” Consider the sequence -ough. Depending on the word, it can be pronounced as in through, rough, cough, plough, thought, or thorough. For a native speaker, this is a headache. For an immigrant learning English as a second language, it is a nightmare.
In the mid-19th century, the Utah Territory was a melting pot of converts arriving from Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Wales. Brigham Young, the pragmatic leader of the territory, viewed the Latin alphabet as a blunt tool that wasted time and ink. He believed a phonetic system would:
- Drastically reduce the time required for children to learn to read.
- Help non-English speaking immigrants acquire the language faster (unifying the community).
- Save money on printing costs by reducing the number of letters needed to write words.
The Solution: 38 Characters for 38 Sounds
The task of developing the system fell largely to George D. Watt, a linguist and stenographer who was an expert in Pitman Shorthand. Released publicly in 1854, the Deseret Alphabet was designed to be phonetically isomorphic—meaning there was a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and a sound.
The alphabet (in its most common iteration) consisted of 38 characters (later 40). It jettisoned the Latin alphabet entirely in favor of new symbols designed to look somewhat uniform. The system included:
- Specific Vowels: Separate characters for the “a” in ate, art, ask, and all.
- Consolidation: Single characters for sounds that English usually represents with digraphs, such as the /ʃ/ (sh), /tʃ/ (ch), /ŋ/ (ng), /ð/ (voiced th), and /θ/ (unvoiced th).
If you saw the word “phylogeny” in standard English, you have to memorize that ‘ph’ makes an ‘f’ sound. In the Deseret Alphabet, you would simply use the character for /f/. It removed the ambiguity of silent letters entirely. The word “knife” would be spelled with three characters: /n/, /ai/, /f/.
The Aesthetic of Efficiency
Visually, the script was jarring. Unlike the Latin alphabet, which features “ascenders” (lines going up, like d, h, l) and “descenders” (lines going down, like p, q, g) to create a distinct word shape, the Deseret characters were mostly of uniform height. They were curvy, loop-heavy, and reminiscent of the shorthand from which Watt drew inspiration.
While linguistically precise, this uniformity created a wall of text that tired the eye. Without the varying vertical shapes of Latin letters, “scanning” a page became difficult. A line of Deseret text looked less like sentences and more like a monotonous geometric pattern.
The Rollout: A Territory-Wide Experiment
The Deseret Alphabet wasn’t a hobby project; it was state-sponsored reform. The regents of the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah) championed the script. Between the late 1850s and 1860s, the Territory invested significant resources into the project.
They commissioned heavy type blocks from St. Louis and San Francisco. They printed The Deseret First Book and The Deseret Second Book (school primers), and portions of the Bible. The Deseret News began printing columns in the new script. The climax of the movement came in 1869 when the entire Book of Mormon was printed in the alphabet—a printing run that stands today as one of the most expensive and rare editions of the text.
There was even a brief foray into numismatics, with a $10 gold coin minted featuring the Deseret characters for “Holiness to the Lord.”
Why Did It Fail?
Despite the logic behind the reform and the authority of the church supporting it, the Deseret Alphabet was dead by the mid-1870s. Why did such a well-intentioned linguistic experiment collapse?
1. Economical Inertia
Ultimately, language reform is a supply chain issue. Even in the isolated Utah Territory, thousands of books existed in standard English. To switch to Deseret, everything would need to be reprinted. The cost of casting new metal type for printing presses was exorbitant, and utilizing existing English books was simply cheaper than printing new ones.
2. The “Ugliness” Factor
To put it bluntly, people didn’t like reading it. Even George D. Watt, its creator, eventually criticized the aesthetic, noting that the characters were too similar to one another. It lacked the calligraphic beauty of the Latin script. Reading requires rapid visual recognition, and the Deseret Alphabet required intense concentration to decipher.
3. The End of Isolation
The death knell was the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. The railroad ended Utah’s relative isolation, bringing an influx of “Gentiles” (non-Mormons) and standard English periodicals, books, and trade goods. The practical utility of a unique, insular alphabet vanished the moment Utah became connected to the rest of the industrialized world.
The Legacy of the Deseret Alphabet
The Deseret Alphabet serves as a reminder of the tension between linguistic prescriptive logic and human habit. It joins the ranks of other failed reforms, such as Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet or the Shavian alphabet advocated by George Bernard Shaw.
However, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. In the digital age, the Deseret Alphabet has found a second life among typography geeks, Mormon history enthusiasts, and amateur linguists. The characters have even been included in the Unicode Standard (U+10400–U+1044F), meaning you can use them on computers today.
While it failed to revolutionize the English language, the Deseret Alphabet remains a monument to pioneer pragmatism—a time when a community believed they could remake not just their geography, but the very way they communicated, from the ground up.