Adrienne Landes and Dr. David Bowie, Linguistics

Great writers are often praised for their fine ear for dialogue; Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy all had the talent for recreating discourse that gives their work authenticity and their characters individuality. While I will not be writing about my contemporary neighbors and countrymen, as did these authors, I have studied the language of my characters in an effort both to enrich the body of existing linguistic research, and also as background research for a play about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The best dialogue makes use of the eccentricities unique to a society, thus I have recorded the distinctive and intriguing grammar and diction usage among eighteenth-century white settlers in southern Utah.

This being a qualitative pilot research project, I studied a small but varied sample of unedited writings by people residing in antebellum Utah. Some obvious limitations in my research is the lack of audio histories from this time period which would give a clearer picture of speech patterns instead of relying on the stiff formality of pioneer writing. I overcame this problem by mining countless pages for the expressive phrases or distinctive sentence structures that gives some idea of how the writer organized words in dialogue. One limitation that can neither be ignored nor denied is the lost dialects of those who were illiterate.

My five resources reflect the prevailing demography of the time: men, women, English immigrants, Northerners, Southerners, educated, and uneducated.

Rachel Lee’s Diary (Tennessee native)
John D. Lee’s Diary (Tennessee native)
John Steele
Joseph Lee Robinson Journal (Vermont native)
William Fawcett papers (Yorkshire native)

I found four different kinds of linguistic anomalies. I must stress that not all recorded expressions are necessarily incorrect by today’s standards, but all reflect the manner of speech in antebellum Utah.

Phonetic (Sound or syllabification changes)

Knowlage to the truth (R. Lee)
Meeting was held as usal (R. Lee)
Their families are smawl (J. Lee)
We were favored with some very nice songs by the brethrn (Robinson)
Grainary (Robinson)

Morphological phenomena (Words with altered structures)

Preform (R. Lee)
The house notwithstanding that it was very fully of people was as still as death (Robinson)
They were colegeing with the Indians (Robinson)
It rained considerable Saturday (Robinson)

Syntactic (Sentence structure anomalies)

There from (R. Lee)
It is not for you to set in judgment (J. Lee)
They persued after them (Steele)
They then came on to Beaver (Steele)
I had some conversation with her (Robinson)
Got the breakfast and did up the work (Robinson)
My wife and me received our Endowments in the Temple in Nauvoo. (Fawcett)
Got her breakfast (Robinson)

Lexical choices (Word choice)

Wherein (R. Lee)
One month hense (R. Lee)
Whereupon (R. Lee)
Aborigines (R. Lee)
They poisoned a animal that died (Steele)
In view of this, we were cogitating upon our bed, the other night, what would be the state of the world a hundred years hence. (Steele)
As we were nearing the place (Steele)
As quick as thought (Robinson)
I arose (Robinson)
Did not feel at liberty to administer (Robinson)
I went to the field and plowed and put in some eats (Robinson)
Lath and whitewash (Robinson)
Allum mines and gum (Robinson)
Surely we had a very affecting time (Robinson)
Ordained by Priest Thomas Baterman (Robinson)

While many films and plays portray pioneer dialects as simply bad grammar with hackneyed, old-fashioned phrases, I have discovered that many southern Utahans had beautiful English accents, especially dialects similar to those heard in Yorkshire. This is probably best explained by the success the Mormon missionaries experienced in that area. These British voices also mixed with the relaxed Southern drawls and Yankee twangs in the melting pot that was southern Utah.

As a writer, the most interesting categories of dialectic anomalies were the lexical and the syntactic choices. The phonetic aspects of my characters’ speech are usually in the hands of the production’s speech coach, so I will probably write an appendix of phonetic suggestions but refrain from misspelling words in the script. The morphological phenomena and the lexical choices I found are a writer’s dream. Instead of creating imitation dialogue, I now have a trove of actual conversations and characteristic expressions that will add a rich realism to this historical play. An unforeseen consequence of this research is the personal growth I have felt as I studied the records of my own ancestors who participated in this dynamic moment in Church history.