The Alphabet Utah Invented to Replace English

The Deseret Alphabet was a 38-character phonetic writing system that Utah’s pioneer leaders adopted in 1854 to replace standard English spelling. Each symbol stood for a single sound, so a word was written exactly the way it left your mouth — no silent letters, no “gh” that says “f,” no rules to memorize. Brigham Young championed it, a former shorthand clerk named George D. Watt drew most of the characters, and for about two decades the territory printed schoolbooks, newspaper columns, and even a full Book of Mormon in a script almost no one alive can read today.

It is one of the strangest artifacts in Utah history: a serious, well-funded attempt to give an entire people a new way to write, launched from a valley that had been a settlement for barely seven years.

Why anyone thought English needed fixing

English spelling is a mess, and the pioneers were not the first to notice. The same letters do different jobs from word to word. Think of the “ough” in though, through, cough, and tough — four spellings, four different sounds. A child learning to read has to memorize thousands of these exceptions one at a time.

Reformers had been circling the problem for a century. Benjamin Franklin drafted a phonetic alphabet. Noah Webster simplified American spelling — he’s the reason we write color instead of colour. In England, Isaac Pitman built a shorthand system around the actual sounds of speech. Brigham Young knew this history, and he had a specific reason to care about it that most reformers didn’t.

Utah in the 1850s was filling up with converts from across Europe — English, Danish, Welsh, Swedish — many of whom spoke little or no English. Young wanted a Zion where these newcomers could become literate fast, without wrestling the tangle of traditional spelling. A phonetic alphabet, he reasoned, would let a Danish immigrant sound out English on the page the same way a child would, and it would keep the community’s writing uniform. This was nation-building through spelling.

Who actually built it

In 1850, Young asked the board of regents of the University of Deseret — the school that would later become the University of Utah — to study ways to reform the alphabet. After several years of proposals, the regents approved a phonetic system on January 19, 1854.

The person most responsible for the letterforms was George D. Watt. Watt has a distinction all his own in Latter-day Saint history: he was the faith’s first British convert, baptized in England in 1837. He was also a trained stenographer who had mastered Pitman’s shorthand, which meant he already thought in phonemes — the individual units of sound that make up spoken words. Watt built the Deseret Alphabet on that foundation, pulling shapes from Pitman’s characters, from the Latin alphabet, and from his own invention. The result was 38 characters, one for each of the 38 sounds Pitman had identified in spoken English.

Look at the script and it reads like nothing else — rounded, looping forms with no obvious relatives, closer to a runic system than to the ABCs. That unfamiliarity was the whole point, and it would also become the fatal flaw.

What they printed in it

Young didn’t treat this as a thought experiment. He put money behind it.

Church leaders commissioned new metal printing type so the characters could be set and printed properly. Orson Pratt oversaw the work in New York City, where the type was designed and cast — a job that ran to roughly $18,500, a staggering sum for a frontier territory in the 1860s. Between 1859 and 1864, the Deseret News ran a handful of columns in the new script. In 1868, the Church printed school primers: a 36-page first reader and a 72-page second reader, with about 10,000 copies of each, sold for 15 and 20 cents. The following year, 1869, came the crown of the project — the Book of Mormon set entirely in the Deseret Alphabet.

Those books are collector’s items now. A schoolchild in 1868 Utah could, in theory, have learned to read from a primer written in a script that would be extinct within a generation.

Why it failed

The Deseret Alphabet died for reasons that were obvious in hindsight and probably should have been obvious at the time.

The people it was supposed to help least needed it most. Anyone already literate in English had no reason to relearn reading from scratch in a strange script. And the immigrants it was meant to serve faced a brutal math problem: a few dozen books existed in the Deseret Alphabet, against an entire world of material — newspapers, novels, Bibles, letters — already printed in the Latin alphabet. When the transcontinental railroad reached Utah in 1869, that flood of ordinary English print only got wider and cheaper. Learning a script you could use on four books was a bad trade against learning the one that ran the rest of the continent.

Young himself came to admit it. According to George Q. Cannon, the Church leader acknowledged that the alphabet was “not so well adapted for the purpose designed as it was hoped,” and that the characters were both unfamiliar and hard to read. After Young’s death in 1877, the project lost its one indispensable champion, and the alphabet quietly fell out of use. A few devotees kept it alive in private — Wilford Woodruff logged some journal entries in it — but as a public writing system it was finished.

Where the Deseret Alphabet turns up today

Here’s the twist the pioneers couldn’t have predicted: the alphabet outlived its own failure.

In March 2001, the Deseret Alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard — the master list of characters that lets computers display the world’s writing systems — after a request from John H. Jenkins, an engineer at Apple. That made a 19th-century Utah spelling experiment one of the first scripts encoded beyond the basic set, sitting in the same digital catalog as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Old Norse runes. Jenkins went on to typeset classics in the script for fun, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Over its short working life the alphabet found its way onto more than books. Historians count four printed books, plus manuscripts, newspaper columns, private journals, letters, minutes — and, in the odder corners of the record, a gold coin and at least one gravestone carved in the script. Those last two live somewhere between documented history and Utah lore; treat them as the folklore they mostly are until you’re standing in front of one.

The University of Utah, the direct descendant of the University of Deseret whose regents approved the thing in 1854, still holds original Deseret Alphabet material in its library collections. So does the Church History Library in Salt Lake. If you want to see the strangest alphabet the American West ever produced, it’s a few miles from where it was born.

What the experiment was really about

Strip away the letterforms and the Deseret Alphabet was an argument: that a community could remake even something as deep as its writing to fit its own needs, and that literacy was worth an enormous, risky investment. The specific answer — 38 loopy characters almost nobody could read — was wrong. The instinct behind it, that the frontier should build its own tools rather than inherit everyone else’s, is about as Utah as it gets.