Talk:Utah Mormon English

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2019 and 24 April 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Peterjwms, JMillett.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:37, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Conflict of Interest

I'm concerned that there's a definite WP:Conflict of interest going on here. This brand-new article is almost entirely sourced with Brigham Young University papers added here by Brigham Young University editors. In my personal opinion, Utah English may justify a section under Western American English but not its own entire article. Wolfdog (talk) 13:15, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

I think that we've shown well enough that this topic deserves its own article. The existing section under Western American English is small and doesn't have enough of note about Utah English. It is true that it is still up for debate whether or not it is a full dialect, or just a unique part of Western American English, but that's also true for California English and Pacific Northwest English, and both of those have articles. Utah English has enough unique history and features behind it that it deserves its own article. If you noticed, in the heading and in the "Research" section, we explicitly said that Utah English may not be a full dialect, which I think solves your concern about whether or not Utah English justifies an article or just a section This article is also not "almost entirely sourced" with papers from here at BYU, several of them are from the American Speech academic journal and researchers at the University of Utah, but those that are written by people at BYU are credible academic sources, excluding the two news articles that we added and only cited once or twice. Part of the reason that we chose to write this article is because we're both students at BYU; I'm a linguistics major here, but I'm from California and my partner is from Maryland. Neither of us actually speak Utah English, but we're in a place where we observe it, and it was interesting to us, which is why we wrote about it, which I think can show that there isn't really a conflict of interest. The people interested in a topic and writing about it are going to be in a place where it is more prevalent, which is true for both of us. I would argue that this article should not have been deleted due to "lack of discussion" after 4 days, 2 of which were the weekend, and that the article does deserve its own page, which I think we have shown due to our sources, the history behind Utah English, and the precedent set on Wikipedia for articles about dialects or sub-dialects that may not be full dialects, but still have existing pages because there are enough differences and history that they deserve a page. Peterjwms (talk) 21:04, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Peterjwms. I didn't see any responses forthcoming, so I decided to be bold and went ahead with the merge. I'm happy to discuss though. With 80 in-text citations on the page, nearly 60 are from Brigham Young University. You're right that some varieties of English that are not confirmed "dialects" have their own pages, but these tend to have well-documented features, especially unique ones. For all the writing you and your colleague(s) amassed at Utah English, what actually describes the defining and unique features of a Utah English that earn it its own page? These features would appear under the sections Lexicon and Phonology, correct? (Research, Distribution, etc. all appear secondary to the actual existence of a Utah English and focus on background info of the state, its culture, history, etc.) Here are the features definitively listed under Lexicon and Phonology, and my thoughts on each:

• euphemism instead of expletives: The cited Lillie source actually says Utah speakers are wrong about these assumptions and doesn't show a significant use of euphemisms in Utah English, unless perhaps specifically among the LDS community.
• propredicate "do" or "done": This is a legitimately defining feature for a dialect! However, notice that its researchers describe it as a feature primarily of LDS English rather than Utah as a whole.
• soft drink: Like most of the West, the labels pop/soda/coke are in somewhat free variation.
• you guys: There's nothing interesting about this. A majority of Americans use "you guys". The same is true of the rest of the terms mentioned under Lexicon -- they are at least nationally known and unmarked. Some are even majority-used nationwide!
• pronouncing "tour" as /tor/: Again, this is common nationwide.
• "milk" as /mɛlk/. This indeed may be a robust defining feature for a dialect -- I don't happen to know personally. However, it also certainly appears in some speakers in California, the North, New England, the West, and so on. Even the repeatedly cited Chatterton article from BYU admits that this feature "has been noted in other parts of the Mountain West area" beyond Utah (4 [16 in the PDF]) and is described by the author as a "folk-linguistic stereotypical feature", just like, I suspect, many of these purported features: i.e. non-majority features exaggerated and stereotyped in Utah cultural lore.
• The unusual pronunciations for creek and crayon (is this even unusual?) as well as pin-pen merger are as varied in Utah as in many, many parts of the West and even throughout the whole country. Pronouncing "creek" as "crick" is really the most marked feature and, even in Utah, this is certainly a definite minority feature. Look at Bert Vaux's work, for example: this variant is reported among only 8% of Utahns in his Harvard Dialect Survey! Nothing to write home about.
• the central offglide in "pit" and "pet": I'd like to hear more about this, but A Handbook of Variety of English describes this as a possible variant throughout the West, not just specific to Utah.
• cord-card merger: This is a legit Utah feature. Y It would've been nice, however, for editors to have mentioned that it is a feature rapidly in decline and best recorded among the oldest Utahns.
• monophthongization of the /ay/- sound: This variant is found scattered throughout the Southwestern U.S. and isn't specific to (and certainly isn't predominant in) Utah. See the Atlas of North American English (283) where, of all the Utah cities studied (Ogden, Salt Lake City, Orem, and Provo), not one records any speaker who uses this kind of monophthongization. Even so, I'm willing to believe it may be a more rural Utah feature, but still -- this monophthongization is recorded in other Southwestern U.S. cities, including 2 of the 3 cities in Arizona as well as in Los Angeles, but not Utah.

That seems to be it. A great deal of research has been done, yes, but here's what all that research has revealed: very little about uniqueness in Utah. This is more an article about "Research on Utah English" than any reality of a "Utah English". I say we stick to the new Utah section I've added at Western American English. If anything, Utah English perfectly aligns to Western American English, with only one or two hairs out of place... and, in fact, only out of place in a minority of Utah speakers. Wolfdog (talk) 18:37, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Any other thoughts? No one else has chimed in. I've allowed over a week this time. I'll move the page in a day or so. If you still feel otherwise, we can take it to a conflict noticeboard or whatever the appropriate protocol may be. Thank you. Wolfdog (talk) 21:49, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

WolfdogSorry, I've been unable to respond these past couple weeks. The truth is, yes, many of these characteristics are very similar to the characteristics of Western American English, which is something that we've acknowledged in the article itself. Part of that is because there hasn't been enough research done on all of Western American English, and all the western states are sort of lumped together, without knowing whether or not there actually are differences among them because comprehensive research on all the western states hasn't been done yet, which is another thing we covered in the article. Also, in the history and development of Utah English that we discussed, we showed the reasons why Utah English has these different features that are similar to other dialects in the US. The fact that Utah English shares characteristics with other dialects is not a reason to delete the page on it; the same is true for California English, and Pacific Northwest English. The other thing is, many of these dialects are in a way subdialects of Western American English or American English anyways, and need to be compared to all of English including all of these. I can't speak to all of the different linguistic characteristics you addressed, but as for the uniqueness of Utah English, we said at the beginning that it comes more from the unique combination of all of these different traits, many of which are visible in other dialects. If you have reliable sources disproving our research, I'm happy to have you edit this page and help it continue to grow and change as we learn more. By no means was our research meant to be the end of this article's growth, but since it was something we were interested in, we decided to start this page. Another fact is that it doesn't matter how many speakers of the dialect there are for it to be qualified as such; obviously, a single person's or small group's unique accent might not qualify as a dialect, but Utah English is far greater than that. I do agree that its usage is in decline in certain area, and I think we included that fact, but if I'm wrong on that, I'm glad to change that. But even if the dialect is declining, that doesn't mean the page should be removed. If we need to change things on it so that it discusses Utah English as a historical dialect, or as an exaggerated folk dialect today that existed in the past, then we can do that, but there's enough history, research, culture, and acknowledgment behind Utah English that I think it still deserves a page. I think any necessary changes should be made instead of completely removing the article. Peterjwms (talk) 23:33, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Peterjwms, it's not merely that many of these characteristics are very similar to the characteristics of Western American English but than in fact Utah English simply is Western American English. And we have a page on that already. On the other hand, California gets its own page because it shows developing innovations that distinguish certain speakers from the rest of the West as does, to some extent, Pacific Northwest English. This does not seem to be true of the English spoken in Utah. My job isn't to disprove your research; the research has already disproven any salient notion of a Utah English. Let me repeat what I said above: A great deal of research has been done, yes, but here's what all that research has revealed: very little about uniqueness in Utah. This is more an article about "Research on Utah English" than any reality of a "Utah English". The academic work certainly shows a lot of interest among Utahn scholars in pinning down what makes English in Utah unique, yet the result of all this research: nothing noteworthy.

By analogy, I could start a page called Connecticut English (my native dialect) where I make a completely research-supported article about a dialect in which creek and miracle are realized with [i], lawyer with [ɔɪ], huge with [hj], and you guys as the common second-person plural pronoun, plus some actually interesting distinctions like the term tag sale being greatly preferred over the nationwide standard garage sale, grinder over the nationwide standard sub, sneakers over the common alternative of running shoes, rotary preferred over traffic circle, and New Haven being pronounced with stress on Haven, etc. These are all true, majority-speaker features of Connecticut English, and I could use a variety of the best sources to back me up (see Vaux's study, DARE, etc.). I could also create a History section citing scholars who speculate on migration patterns in CT that might have made the local English that way it is, especially in that it doesn't sound like nearby Boston or New York English. I could create a Distribution section that separates different mini-regions of CT, as actually credibly suggested by scholars like Charles Boberg. And yet... Connecticut English still wouldn't deserve its own page on Wikipedia; that constellation of many minor, cherry-picked features (some of them, just as on the Utah English page, not even remarkable, like how both Utah and Connecticut speakers say you guys) just isn't distinguishing or separately-defining enough to merit a standalone page. We have a page called Western New England English and that covers everything Connecticut needs (and in fact, even the American English page could cover the most important features of Connecticut speakers). Or how about I narrow in even more and create an article called New Haven English? There's been some credible research done on that (sub-[sub-])dialect and how only very slightly interesting it might be.

My idea, by the way, wasn't to completely remove the article so much as to actually to merge it where it plainly belongs: Western American English. Hope some of this makes sense. Thanks. Wolfdog (talk) 19:43, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Wolfdog, we've shown that these characteristics aren't the same as Western American English though. It shares many characteristics of Western American English, hence its classification as a likely sub-dialect of Western American English, but it has enough differences that the research and we have proven to merit its own article. If you actually look at Pacific Northwest English, very little that is truly unique distinguishes it from any other dialect: its phonology section is divided into characteristics it shares with other dialects, plus two miscellaneous characteristics, one of which is also shared with Utah English; its lexicon section has fewer than ten words, several of which are from Chinook anyways. And if you look at California English, the first line of the phonology section is "California English mostly aligns to typical American speech, most Californians specifically speaking with a Western American accent." The number of people speaking it doesn't matter. Also, I don't see your argument that the research has already disproven any salient notion of a Utah English as holding any weight because as far as I can tell, you haven't used any sources to back up your arguments that "Utah English is Western American English" or to show that our interpretations of the sources we used was wrong and that we in fact disproved our own points. Our research and all the articles, including the local news sources and the study that used Utah English as a distinguishing dialect, prove implicitly, in their acceptance of Utah English as a distinct dialect, and explicitly, in the research done, that Utah English is, at the very least, worthy of an article, and is a distinct (sub-)dialect different from Western American English.

As to your analogy of Connecticut English, that is a far smaller area and population than that of Utah and spreading into the states nearby in which Utah English exists. That's still an article that I would personally be interested in reading, and would like to see exist though. The difference, however, is that these features do separate Utah English from Western American English, and removing the page to give it one paragraph under Western American English doesn't do it justice.

I think it would be helpful to have some other editors chime in here, because it doesn't seem like we're going to get anywhere right now. Hope this makes sense. Thanks. Peterjwms (talk) 21:16, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Peterjwms, you want sources, so please look at the ANAE (previously mentioned above). Utah squarely falls under the Western dialect in all regards. Check out the ANAE website here and more specifically here. So, as a baseline to start from (just like California and the Pacific Northwest), Utah English is Western American English. What makes Pacific Northwest English interesting (though I'd be just as happy with it getting a section at Western American English) is its possible configuration of several California features, several Canadian features, and also several of both: all features of interest. Meanwhile, I went through all the described Utah English features above (please feel free to respond to each in my bulleted list) and found one feature of interest, perhaps two. You really do insist on the burden of proof being on me, but it's your own articles that put forward unremarkable results (again, you can see why above). And again, I'll give you the card-cord merger as being one particularly interesting result. (I feel almost tempted to ask explicitly since you're not being explicit -- what are the others? All the one mentioned on the page I analyzed above, already, in the bulleted list, going through them -- one by one. Are you saying you want more sources there? Yet you still feel like a section wouldn't do Utah justice. What is there to talk about that is either a unique feature or a unique configuration of features??) Even the Lillie (1997) article concludes that "The majority of Utahns do not predict their own speech habits accurately" (51) and "Each of the assumptions mentioned exists in only a minority of the speakers surveyed" (54). OK, so you say you don't care about the number of people speaking it, but why is that unimportant? The number of people that speak a special dialect does matter, especially when such numbers of speakers appear to be growing in California and the Pacific Northwest, yet declining in Utah. All U.S. states have a crazily large amount of dialect/sociolect/idiolect diversity (I've known neighbors and even siblings who grew up side by side using different pronunciations), but the question is if there is some particular and consistent pattern of features that exists in an area to earn it its own dialect page. That is what's worthy of an article. (Also, here's an article that might help your case, by the way; it's a non-BYU article that suggests some dialect uniqueness in Utah.) Also, you're wrong about Connecticut; it actually has a larger population than Utah. Thank you. Wolfdog (talk) 22:34, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Another thought: I think what partly bothers me about a full-fledged article on a dialect with one or two defining features is that it tends to give a reader the impression they are looking at some significantly unusual or distinct form of language ("dialect" is commonly used in the context of German, Chinese, or Arabic, for example, to refer to varieties so different that they are essentially whole separate languages, and are often explicitly classified as such); a full, long-winded article may thus give readers trouble homing in on exactly what is so distinct or defining about this language variety after all, when really, as I've shown, the differences can be summed up in maybe one to three sentences. To see how this is done already, look at the brevity, for example, of the Cincinnati section on Midland American English, Alaska section on Western American English, or Rhode Island section on Eastern New England English. These all have as much a claim (or more) to being dialects/subdialects as Utah English, yet myself and other editors have kept them as simple, concise sections of the larger dialects to which they undeniably belong (just as Utah undeniably and perfectly fits within Western American English). Yet these three sections get right to the point for readers about their variety's distinct characteristics, without musing for paragraph after paragraph about geographic distributions, migration patterns, history of the state and its culture, etc. in order to justify for each one a whole long article of its own. It's the defining features that should make up the bulk of a dialect page or section. Wolfdog (talk) 09:54, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Also, in concurrence with Peterjwms, here is a local news article documenting someone else's work on this topic. [1] Rollidan (talk) 14:48, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm well aware of the Vaux study. If you look above, you'll see that I've already discussed it. Wolfdog (talk) 18:50, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Wolfdog, I am no means an expert in linguistics, so I cannot argue with your reasoning behind the distinctive features. However, I'm confused as to where you think the conflict of interest is coming from. Certainly those who created the article know enough in the field to see it as a separate dialect. In addition, it appears that it gets reasonable coverage in local newspapers [2][3]. Regardless, we need more input from other editors before merging.Rollidan (talk) 22:33, 9 May 2019 (UTC)

Happy to wait another week. Thanks for someone responding. Wolfdog (talk) 18:47, 10 May 2019 (UTC)

Wolfdog, I agree with Peterjwms and think this article should stay. I am a dialectologist specializing in Western American Englishes. Yes, it's true that there aren't a lot of unique aspects of Utah English. The cord-card merger is found in St. Louis and Texas, for example. But, as was brought up already, there's nothing particularly unique about Pacific Northwest English either (I would know—I wrote a dissertation on it!). The main claim to fame there is prevelar raising in words like bag, but that's pretty common in Canada and any state that touches Canada really, and is in fact more common in other areas. YET, Pacific Northwest English has its own page. It may be the case that Utah has a unique combination of features that make it distinct. I've recently moved to Utah, and I can tell you that there is a Utah accent. We dialectologists haven't done enough to accurately pin it down I don't think, and we might be grasping at straws sometimes, but there is something there. It's not the same as "general" Western American English. Even if this page lacks enough detail to sufficiently satisfy some people that it's a distinct enough thing, it provides the scaffolding for additional sources to be filled in (like DBowie's research below).

Also, I don't know if it's necessarily a problem that most of the articles come from BYU and University of Utah scholars. Who else should be writing about Utah English? Most of the work on California comes from California scholars. Most of the work on Washington comes from Washington scholars. Most of the work on Oregon comes from Oregon scholars. We study the people around us. Joeystanley (talk) 15:49, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Move discussion

Perhaps this article would be better served by being moved to the name "Mormon English". Any thoughts? Wolfdog (talk) 18:31, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Scholarly sources to add

This is a worthwhile article, since there is a scholarly literature out there on Mormon vs. non-Mormon English in Utah. Chatterton's thesis and Marianna Di Paolo's 1993 article are already mentioned, but Baker-Smemoe & Bowie's pair of articles should be folded in somehow. (Disclosure: I am Bowie. This is why I'm not adding these in myself.) Specifically:

• Baker[-Smemoe], Wendy & David Bowie. 2009. Religious affiliation as a correlate of linguistic behavior. University of Pennsylvania working papers in linguistics: Selected papers from NWAV 37 15(2). Article 2.
• Baker-Smemoe, Wendy & David Bowie. 2015. Linguistic behavior and religious activity. Language & communication 42. 116–124. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2014.12.004.

Also, if Chatterton's thesis is included in this, it's probably worth finding a way to fold Meechan's dissertation in, as well, especially if this gets changed to a page on Mormon English in Utah to Mormon English in the Mormon Dominance Area (which, to be honest, is more of what's going on here, in my opinion):

• Meechan, Marjory Ellen. 1999. The Mormon drawl: Religious ethnicity and phonological variation in southern Alberta. University of Ottawa PhD dissertation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DBowie (talk • contribs) 18:29, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

@DBowie: are you saying you'd prefer this article to be titled Mormon English? Wolfdog (talk) 20:33, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Also, would you be interesting in stating any of your main findings in either or both papers? That would be very helpful for us! Wolfdog (talk) 20:35, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Oh, no, not saying it needs to be renamed, but rather saying that "Mormon English" in Utah is part of a wider phenomenon. Of course, "Utah English" isn't really limited to Utah (first because what people call Utah English is mainly actually Wasatch Front English—Southern Utah, f'rex, is rather different, following Carver 1987—and second because Utah falls into the wider pattern of Western varieties of North American English), so it's kind of a mess of what to call anything anyway.

But the headline finding from Baker-Smemoe's and my work is that there are small but real phonological differences (almost certainly below the level of conscious awareness and control, though we haven't had a chance to test that to this point) between self-identified Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah County (somewhat parallel to Di Paolo's syntactic findings), and that when you break Mormons down into those who actively participate in the religion and those who don't, the "inactive" Mormons act in many ways more like the non-Mormons, but show some tendency of actually behaving in ways that are ever more non-Mormon-like than the non-Mormons themselves. (The thing that makes this fun for me, though this isn't necessarily an "encylopedic" sort of thought, is that both religious affiliation and religiosity are personal choices that can change at any moment, so there's something really intriguing here about identity construction and such.) DBowie (talk) 00:35, 28 March 2020 (UTC)