The Deseret Alphabet: A Writing System That Almost Was
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
In the eighteen fifties, the territorial government of Utah briefly attempted to replace the English alphabet with a thirty-eight-character phonetic writing system called the Deseret Alphabet. The system was developed under the direction of Brigham Young and the Regents of the University of Deseret, with the goal of creating a more efficient way to represent the sounds of the English language on the page. The letters were rounded and distinct, bearing no resemblance to the Latin alphabet, designed from scratch rather than adapted from existing script.
The project had a practical aim: the LDS church was bringing thousands of European converts to Utah every year, speaking German, Danish, Welsh, Swedish, and other languages. A phonetic alphabet, the theory went, would make English literacy easier to achieve for people who had to unlearn the irregular orthography of existing written English. A child would be able to read exactly what was on the page, without the disconnects between English spelling and English pronunciation.
The Deseret Alphabet was used in a small number of official publications. A Book of Mormon was printed in it. Several issues of the Deseret News were typeset with the new characters. Then the project faded. The expense of maintaining two typesetting systems was prohibitive. The converts found their own ways to literacy. The transcontinental railroad, arriving in eighteen sixty-nine, connected Utah more tightly to the English-language culture of the rest of the country and made a parallel writing system harder to sustain.
The Deseret Alphabet survives in archives and in the work of typographers and language enthusiasts who have kept it readable. The city it was meant to serve moved on without it. But the impulse behind it, the belief that the community could build its own systems for everything, language included, is very much a Salt Lake City founding impulse.
