Review
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Title: Utah English
Author: David Ellingson Eddington
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Non-Fiction
Date: 2023
Pages: 192 (Notes, bibliography, and index begin on p. 171)
Binding: Paper, hardback, Digital
ISBN: 9781647691097 (paperback—also available in hardback and ebook)
Cost (paperback): $24.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
If (a) you live in Utah; (b) you’re from outside Utah but you have ties to the place and judgments about how its natives speak (I belong in this category); or (c) you’re a linguist, the following questions may have arisen in your mind:
Why (the heck) are they saying “moun’[?]in”? or “like” (fifty times in one sentence)? or “Spanish Fark”?
Does anybody else in the universe talk like these people—their accents, their idioms, their grammar?
Is “Utah English” peculiarly Mormon? Or rural? Or indicative of a particular background or socioeconomic level?
Is the dialect of American English spoken in Utah so different from the dialects of English spoken elsewhere in the United States that Utahns can be identified (and maybe stigmatized)?
If you shrug off these questions when they arise, merely noting their ability to annoy you, Utah English, by David Ellingson Eddington, may not be the book for you, because it dives deeply into each one with sometimes excruciatingly quantitative precision. But if they intrigue you and you want to know more–well, then, for the same reasons and more, this may be exactly the book you need.
David Ellingson Eddington is an emeritus professor of linguistics at BYU with five books and over fifty articles to his name detailing his data-driven research in just such questions. His Statistics for Linguists: A Step-by-Step Guide for Novices (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) reflects his expertise in collecting and analyzing dialectological and sociolinguistic data; that expertise shapes the scholarly aspect of Utah English. There’s another aspect to it, though. In 2022 Arcadia Press published Eddington’s Utahisms: Unique Expressions, Inventions, Place Names and more, a 112-page volume “examining everything truly, uniquely Utah from phonetics to history” (see https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467152440). Eddington is not only prepared to lay out the evidence regarding the origins, breadth, and depth of certain elements of Utahns’ self-presentation, but he also appreciates the idiosyncrasies of his home state. This appreciation—yea, even affection–shapes the book’s approachable style.
In his introduction to Utah English, he explains his motives, intentions, and methods. As a linguist focusing on phonological, sociolinguistic, and morphological issues of the Spanish and English languages, he was not originally concerned with specifically Utahn idiosyncrasies. But when he moved away and then returned, certain speech patterns caught his ear. As a linguist, he felt both motivated and qualified to investigate those patterns to satisfy his own curiosity and to enlighten his Utahn neighbors, linguist and non-linguist alike, about their ubiquity and origins. (The ubiquity and origins of the patterns, not the neighbors.) Using jocular Utahisms to assure his readers of his solidarity, he insists he doesn’t want to be overly academic. He’ll provide data and interpretations, but he’ll also talk about this data in language anyone can understand.
Accordingly, he describes a survey he administered to over two thousand Utahns regarding their pronunciation of specific words/vowels/consonants, as well as their use of certain words. “Pull” or “pole”? “Fill” or “feel”? “You’re welcome” or “mm-hmm”? “Pop” or “soda”? In five chapters on idioms and pronunciations such as these, Eddington graphs and discusses the data from the survey, synthesizing it with similar surveys and studies done by linguists both in and outside of Utah. There are graphs, tables, and statistical explanations on every page. But the conclusions are sometimes surprising and smile-worthy.
Not all supposedly Utah quirks are exclusive to Utah, Eddington says. Some are shared in areas specifically related to Mormon migrations from Ohio and upper New York State, and to sites on the Oregon Trail. Eddington’s discussion of the relationships between “Utahisms” and the idiosyncratic pronunciations and diction of other areas of the United States reveals that immigration and migration account for many usages that I, for one, have ignorantly attributed to lack of education or rural isolation.
Although the attempt to use accessible language to interpret the statistical data sometimes feels like a superhighway veering off onto a road less traveled, this little book is still full of treasures for the layperson who (like me) cringes at certain Utah patterns. They’re not all bad. Read Utah English to see why.