In his new book, 'Utah English,' linguist David Ellingson Eddington surveyed 1,700 Utahns to figure out what words and phrases are considered unique to the Beehive State. His findings are that much of what Utahns think is unique about their language really isn't.
“I was happy that people touched on the big things that I touched on in the book, because I kind of got it right,” Eddington said.
In fact, many of the traits Eddington ends up discussing, he said in an interview, extend well into Nevada and southern Idaho.“What we realize as linguists is, it isn’t just, ‘Hey, here they say it and there they don’t,’” Eddington said. “It’s more like, ‘Here they say it more, but especially if you’re a man, or you’re blue-collar.’ … There are a lot of different factors that play into it, besides just being from Utah or not.
In the book, Eddington writes people “incorrectly assume that because they have never heard the term except from a Utahn, it must exist in Utah and Utah alone, even though it exists elsewhere too.”Eddington also writes that in order to classify something as a Utah trait, data from other states is needed for comparison. However, his findings did identify some areas that influence how Utahns choose their words and pronounce them — including age, gender, education and religious affiliation.
“You’re going to be hard-pressed to find that, except possibly in more rural Utahns and especially older Utahns,” Eddington said. Another example: Pronouncing Spanish Fork with a short “a” sound in “fork,” so it rhymes with “park.” “If you listen to people from Britain, that’s completely normal,” Eddington said. “Doesn’t sound odd at all, but it sounds odd in the U.S. It was a lot more common earlier, and you really only hear older people in Utah saying that, and people in more rural areas.”
Eddington also found that there are two distinct dialects in Utah: Urban and rural. Maps in the book detail how he divided these distinctions, “Basically the Wasatch Front, Cedar City and St. George area are what’s grouped together as urban, and every place else is rural,” he said.
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