Deseret Alphabet Table
| Letter | Name | Sound (IPA) |
|---|---|---|
| ๐ | long i | iห |
| ๐ | long e | eษช |
| ๐ | long a | ษห |
| ๐ | long ah | ษห |
| ๐ | long o | oส |
| ๐ | long oo | uห |
| ๐ | short i | ษช |
| ๐ | short e | ษ |
| ๐ | short a | รฆ |
| ๐ | short ah | ษ |
| ๐ | short o | ส |
| ๐ | short oo | ส |
| ๐ | ay | aษช |
| ๐ | ow | aส |
| ๐ | wu | w |
| ๐ | yee | j |
| ๐ | h | h |
| ๐ | pee | p |
| ๐ | bee | b |
| ๐ | tee | t |
| ๐ | dee | d |
| ๐ | chee | tส |
| ๐ | jee | dส |
| ๐ | kay | k |
| ๐ | gay | ษก |
| ๐ | ef | f |
| ๐ | vee | v |
| ๐ | eth | ฮธ |
| ๐ | thee | รฐ |
| ๐ | es | s |
| ๐ | zee | z |
| ๐ | esh | ส |
| ๐ | zhee | ส |
| ๐ก | er | r |
| ๐ข | el | l |
| ๐ฃ | em | m |
| ๐ค | en | n |
| ๐ฅ | eng | ล |
| ๐ฆ | oi | ษษช |
| ๐ง | ew | juห |
The Deseret alphabet is the most ambitious spelling reform English ever actually built: a phonemic alphabet of forty letters - one letter per sound - commissioned in the 1850s by the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret in territorial Utah, with George D. Watt designing it under the direction of the board led by Brigham Young. The idea was radical simplicity. English spelled in its sounds would be learnable by anyone in weeks, which mattered enormously to a community whose missionary reach and immigrant pipeline brought in converts who had to learn English fast: the church ran language programs for Scandinavian arrivals from the 1850s onward, and a phonemic alphabet was the shortcut. Twelve vowel letters alone - six long, six short, each a distinct shape - cover sound distinctions English spelling routinely buries.
And then it died of economics. The first readers sold for two dollars each - a serious price at the time - and even Young came to see the venture as too expensive when even the most devout Mormons could not be convinced to buy in. What survives is exactly what this chart shows: the complete forty-letter design (twelve vowels plus twenty-eight consonant letters and glides), primers and readers and Book of Mormon excerpts set in specially cast type, and a Unicode block (U+10400, added in version 3.2, 2002) that lets any font, keyboard or chart reproduce the whole system. It is the closest thing English has to a national alphabet that lost the vote.
How to use
- Read the table as the reformers designed it: one letter, one sound. The first twelve rows are the vowels - six long (iห eษช ษห ษห oส uห) and six short (ษช ษ รฆ ษ ส ส) - which between them cover every English vowel distinction the system wanted to make visible; compare that to the five-vowel, dozen-sound mess of ordinary English spelling and the design intent is obvious. The consonants then run in order from h to ล, including dedicated letters English never got: eth (ฮธ) and thee (รฐ) for the two th sounds, esh and zhee for sh and zh, eng for the ng of singer.
- To write, spell purely by ear: each sound takes its one letter, and the result is unpronounceable-proof - anyone who knows the chart can say any word aloud, which is precisely the property English spelling lacks and the reform was built to deliver. The one historical quirk to know before you practice: in the Unicode encoding only the twelve vowels have separate small-letter forms (U+10428 onward); consonants are written with the capital-shaped glyph in both cases, so Deseret text reads with vowel pairs changing shape and consonants staying put. Practice by transcribing your own name phonetically - the reformers would have expected exactly that exercise, and it exercises the vowel table harder than any English word list will.
- Read the real artifacts. The 1850s-60s primers and the Deseret Second Book, plus the Deseret News experiments, are digitized; the Book of Mormon selections set in Deseret are the largest continuous texts ever produced. Reading even a paragraph does two things at once: it proves the phonemic design works (you can say every word), and it shows why the system lost - every page needs the new type, the new handwriting, the new habits, and communities do not pay two dollars a book for that unless the payoff is survival rather than convenience. For the modern letter-by-letter reference, this chart with its Unicode names is the ground truth.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the Deseret alphabet?
George D. Watt, the church’s first English convert and a professional stenographer, designed the system under the direction of the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret, led by Brigham Young. Watt had studied Pitman-style phonography, and the alphabet carries that heritage: it is a phonemic design - sounds first, tradition nowhere - rather than a decorated Latin. The Board, not Young alone, drove the adoption; but Young’s endorsement is why it got type cast, books printed, and schools approached, and his later second thoughts are part of why it died.
Why did the Deseret alphabet fail?
Money and habit. The type had to be designed and cast from scratch, and the first readers sold for $2 each - expensive enough that even Young concluded the venture was too costly when even the most devout Mormons could not be convinced to purchase and study them. Beneath the price sat the deeper problem every spelling reform hits: literacy in the old system was already an asset, and switching meant re-learning to read for everyone at once. The alphabet retreated to church archives, a handful of coins and signs, and revivalist curiosity - a complete, workable design that lost to the economics of switching costs.
What was Deseret used for?
Real reading matter, for a few years: primers and school readers, an English-Deseret vocabulary, excerpts from the Book of Mormon, and experimental issues of the Deseret News. The church’s language programs - including its work with Scandinavian immigrants from the 1850s onward - were the intended audience: a phonemic alphabet would let a Danish or Swedish convert read English sounds without years of English spelling. The largest surviving texts are those religious selections; everyday correspondence in Deseret was always rare, which is why the surviving corpus is small enough to catalog completely.
Is the Deseret alphabet the same as the Mormon alphabet?
They are the same thing under two descriptions. Deseret is the name the Board gave the alphabet (from the Book of Mormon’s word for honeybee, the symbol of industriousness that also named the state they wanted); "the Mormon alphabet" is the outsider’s shorthand. Both refer to the forty-letter phonemic system of 1854 and its Unicode block. If precision matters: the alphabet was a University of Deseret (territorial Utah) project with church leadership behind it, not a script revealed by revelation - it was educational technology, and it was argued for on exactly those grounds.
Why does Deseret have twelve vowels?
Because English has more vowel sounds than five letters, and the reformers refused to approximate. The chart’s twelve vowel letters - six long (iห, eษช, ษห, ษห, oส, uห) and six short (ษช, ษ, รฆ, ษ, ส, ส) - let every distinction English speakers actually make get its own letter: beat versus bit, pool versus pull, caught versus cot. Ordinary spelling hides these distinctions (the same letter a plays five roles in father, cat, call, any, sofa); Deseret’s design makes them unavoidable on the page. That vowel table is the system’s real invention - the consonants are conventional next to it - and it is why the alphabet still interests phoneticians long after the reading public walked away.