BYU linguist David Ellingson Eddington’s quest to identify “Utah English” (The Tribune, Aug. 27) suffers, I think, from its focus on particular pronunciation characteristics. Certainly, we Utahns have an idiosyncratic pronunciation or two, but the linguistic qualities of Utah English have a unique legacy that, I think, is interesting enough to deserve a bit further explication.
When the New World was being settled, groups of ethnicities clustered together geographically. These concentrations tended to produce particular dialectical qualities. In general, linguists identify four principal United States dialects: Southern, New England, New York City and Midwestern. These are very big baskets of generalities, but you get the idea.
As these linguistic communities matured, particular qualities took root, reducing the idiosyncratic variation that existed originally among a community’s speakers. That process is what linguists have called “dialect leveling.”
When the Latter-day Saints pioneers first arrived in Utah, the populace was as international as was the New World population everywhere. And it was before that linguistic “dialect leveling” process had taken place.
When Brigham Young sent LDS adherents to establish cities around the territory, he deliberately selected participants so that no predominant ethnicity was represented in the group. As a result, Utah’s “dialect” is the country’s most cosmopolitan. As such, it is a potpourri of influences bound to defy easy speech pattern/pronunciation encapsulation. And yet, it is itself a product of multi-ethnic evolution, an evolution that, thanks to many factors, continues apace.
Tom Walker, Salt Lake City