‘Utah English?’ BYU linguist says what the heck

Ask people in Utah for examples of “Utah English,” and they’ll answer with a list of traits: Short vowels, euphemistic swearing (like “oh my heck”), odd vocabulary choices.

Linguist David Ellingson Eddington examines many of those traits — coincidentally suggested by Salt Lake Tribune readers and social-media followers — and others in his new book, “Utah English” (being released Tuesday by the University of Utah Press), which considers the question “Is English in Utah truly unique?” (It’s a question he also covers on his Youtube channel.)

“I was happy that people touched on the big things that I touched on in the book, because I kind of got it right,” Eddington said.

In the book, Eddington analyzes data from a 2020 survey of more than 1,700 respondents, all raised in or now living in Utah, covering all 29 counties in the state. In the survey, Eddington included questions to test for 28 different characteristics “that are assumed to form part of Utah English.”

And while Eddington uses “Utah English” as a catch-all term to describe the perceived differences in language supposedly unique to the Beehive State, the Brigham Young University linguistics professor writes that there’s really no such thing.

“Dialectal characteristics rarely coincide with political boundaries, and Utah is no different,” Eddington writes in the book.

In fact, many of the traits Eddington ends up discussing, he said in an interview, extend well into Nevada and southern Idaho.

Overall, Eddington said, Utah English is a mix of things.

“What we realize as linguists is, it isn’t just, ‘Hey, here they say it and there they don’t,’” Eddington said. “It’s more like, ‘Here they say it more, but especially if you’re a man, or you’re blue-collar.’ … There are a lot of different factors that play into it, besides just being from Utah or not.”

The biggest misconception when it comes to the idea of “Utah English” is that “the characteristics that people attribute to Utah English are things that every Utahn says and only Utahns can say,” Eddington said, adding, “there are very few things that you’ll find [in Utah] that are actually completely unique.”

Tracking influences

The heart of Eddington’s findings trace back to the assumption that certain words or pronunciations are unique to Utah — when, in reality, they have origins in other parts of the country and the world.

“Someone comes to Utah and they hear someone say something, [and think,] ‘Oh, that’s the way everyone in Utah speaks,’” Eddington said. “Well, it may be that everyone in Utah and surrounding states talk that way, you never know.”

In the book, Eddington writes people “incorrectly assume that because they have never heard the term except from a Utahn, it must exist in Utah and Utah alone, even though it exists elsewhere too.”

He coins a term for this idea: The “different-means-unique” effect.

Eddington also writes that in order to classify something as a Utah trait, data from other states is needed for comparison. However, his findings did identify some areas that influence how Utahns choose their words and pronounce them — including age, gender, education and religious affiliation.

Some examples:

• Linguists have generally found that young women are at the forefront of linguistic changes.

• “People who are more educated tend to keep the words ‘pool,’ ‘pull’ and ‘pole’ distinct,” he said.

• He also found that those belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to say “pop” more than “soda.” “Soda is the most common term used in the state to refer to carbonated beverages,” Eddington writes. “This is especially true among younger Utahns … soda is preferred by more people raised in the more populated areas of Utah.” But, “the preference for pop increases with age.”

Eddington said all of these factors go back to sociolinguistics, or how social factors can influence language.

“Think about being in high school,” he said. “You knew who the jocks were, you knew who the Goths were. You knew that because of the way they talk, the way they dressed. Everything we do says, ‘This is me, this is the group I belong to,’ and language is no different.”

What makes up ‘Utah English’?

Some of the ways people pronounce words in Utah, Eddington said, are indicative of what he calls “dying traits.”

For example, there’s the vowel mergers for words like “cord” and “card.” It’s a characteristic that bled into Utah English from Northeast settlers in the state.

“You’re going to be hard-pressed to find that, except possibly in more rural Utahns and especially older Utahns,” Eddington said. Another example: Pronouncing Spanish Fork with a short “a” sound in “fork,” so it rhymes with “park.”

Compare that to things like “pool”/“pull”/“pole” merger, which, Eddington said, is more typical with younger people.

“When you look at the history of English, it is vowels changing and shifting and merging and splitting,” Eddington said, and these mergers are among the most characteristic traits of how people speak in Utah.

Another outside influence, a British English quirk, is the pro-predicate “do” — which one might hear if someone asks, “Do you ski well?”, and they answer, “I used to do.”

“If you listen to people from Britain, that’s completely normal,” Eddington said. “Doesn’t sound odd at all, but it sounds odd in the U.S. It was a lot more common earlier, and you really only hear older people in Utah saying that, and people in more rural areas.”

Another example of British ancestry affecting Utah English is the way the name of the town of Hurricane is pronounced — with an “uh” in the final syllable, rather than rhyming with “rain.” “Utah got more British settlers later than other places in the U.S.,” Eddington said.

“‘Hurr-i-cuhn’ is a British pronunciation. People think, ‘Oh, Utahns took that and they deformed it,’” he said, “No, that was probably how a lot of the early settlers pronounced it. So that doesn’t sound odd at all in Utah.”

However, Eddington said, there weren’t any findings that indicated Navajo or other Indigenous languages influenced the origins or characteristics of Utah English. “Other than place names, languages don’t influence each other unless there is bilingualism,” he wrote.

Eddington also found that there are two distinct dialects in Utah: Urban and rural. Maps in the book detail how he divided these distinctions, “Basically the Wasatch Front, Cedar City and St. George area are what’s grouped together as urban, and every place else is rural,” he said.

“The biggest differences you’ll find is going outside the Wasatch Front and you’ll start to hear things that are probably a little bit more conservative or older,” he said.

One myth that Eddington mentions is Utahns forgetting to pronounce the “t” sound in words like “mountain.”

“The big myth about it is the standard pronunciation in the U.S. is to not pronounce the ‘t’ as it’s pronounced in other words,” he said. “That’s not American English. What’s happening is it’s not being dropped. It’s adopting a different point of articulation.”

So what is unique to Utah?

Though the findings show there are not many parts of Utah’s vocabulary that are unique to Utah, there are a few, Eddington said.

For example, Utah is “definitely,” he said, a “potato bug” place.

That one can be traced back to the southern banks of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, Eddington said, two places from which early settlers of Utah came. “They brought their ‘potato bug’ right across the Plains and planted in Utah,” he said. “So that’s a good example of how Utah’s a mixture of whatever influence has happened to come here.”

“Sluff,” a word used to describe skipping class, is a Utahism, according to the book’s survey results. So is “scone,” which in Utah refers to the deep-fried pastry served with butter and honey (different from the dense cake-like British pastry of the same name). There’s also “flipper crotch,” Eddington said, which refers to a slingshot device used in the Rocky Mountain region, though it’s a term used by older Utahns.

“Culinary water” — another term of British origin, referring to drinking water — and “water skeeter,” a word for bugs that walk on water, are unique to Utah, as well.

“Many supposedly unique Utah pronunciations of words such as ‘mountain,’ ‘crick,’ and ‘roof’ are actually attested all across the country,” Eddington writes in his book.

“In short, Utah English is principally a dialect of Western American English that has been shaped by the languages and dialects of the state’s earliest English-speaking settlers and that is following the tides currently shaping the varieties of English spoken throughout the United States.”

Editor’s note • David Ellingson Eddington is the second cousin of Salt Lake Tribune reporter Mark Eddington.

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