In May 1967, staff at the Church Historian’s Office opened a long-forgotten package in a storage area and discovered manuscript copies prepared for printing in the Deseret Alphabet. The cache included portions of the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Deseret Phonetic Speller, and John Jaques’s Catechism. So long had the papers lain undisturbed that their existence had nearly been forgotten. Although the discovery did not prompt a renewed effort at spelling reform, it did spark modest cultural interest. Historians and book collectors began reexamining Deseret Alphabet publications as artifacts of pioneer printing and Mormon intellectual history.

Regional journals highlighted the script as a distinctive expression of Western ambition. Reprints appeared for both scholarly and curiosity-driven audiences. And linguists began citing the alphabet in discussions of spelling reform. By the mid-twentieth century, the Deseret Alphabet had shifted from simple spelling reform to an object of study, nostalgia, and regional pride.

Is the Phonetic Alphabet to Blame for Eating ‘Carn’ with a ‘Fark’? Utah visitors often notice distinctive features of the Utah accent: vowel shifts, softened consonants, and pronunciations shaped by nineteenth-century settlement and relative geographic isolation. These observations point to a broader question at the heart of the Deseret Alphabet: if languages were written exactly as they were spoken, whose pronunciation would define the standard? Designed as a strictly phonetic system, the Deseret Alphabet aimed to represent sounds rather than preserve the irregular spellings of English. In theory, it could capture regional speech with remarkable precision, including the nuances of Utah pronunciation.

Although the alphabet never gained lasting acceptance, it reveals a keen awareness of how language sounds in everyday use. Today, the Utah accent and the Deseret Alphabet share a common thread: both demonstrate how language shapes and expresses cultural identity—one in speech, the other in print. 

Plan 10 from Outer Space is an independent science-fiction satire that draws on Latter-day Saint themes for its storyline. The film follows Lucinda Hall, who discovers a century-old plaque and book written in the Deseret Alphabet by a renegade Mormon prophet. After deciphering the mysterious text, she is pulled into a surreal world inhabited by aliens, angels, and polygamists. For the movie, Salt Lake designer, Ed Bateman, created a modernized digital font and contributed to a renewed appreciation of the Deseret Alphabet—less as a tool for spelling reform and more as a visual and cultural artifact of Latter-day Saint history. Written and directed by Trent Harris, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995 and soon gained a cult following in Utah. Harris went on to establish a distinguished career as a filmmaker and documentarian. Over the years, he wrote and directed six feature films and produced more than 100 documentaries. Both Harris and Bateman have built careers at the University of Utah and are widely regarded as influential figures in Salt Lake’s artistic community.

To our knowledge, none of the original metal type from the Deseret Alphabet’s brief printing history survives today. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the alphabet found new life in digital form. In 1991, Greg Kearney created the first digital Deseret font for the LDS Church History Department, using it in an exhibition that same year. Graphic designer Edward Bateman later scanned characters from a copy of the Deseret Second Book, carefully refining and reconstructing the letterforms into a new digital typeface. John Jenkins of Apple subsequently digitized the Russell Bros. characters, and his work was incorporated into the Unicode Standard, enabling the Deseret Alphabet to be used on computers worldwide. Free software fonts for the Deseret Alphabet are also available. Through its Noto project—an initiative designed to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel—Google has released a Deseret typeface called Noto Sans Deseret. 

 Although the Deseret Alphabet fell out of everyday use by the late nineteenth century, its story does not end there. Several Utah artists have incorporated the Alphabet into their work, but none more extensively than the late Bob Moss. For Moss, the alphabet symbolized a desire for cultural distinction. He embraced it for similar reasons, covering his surfaces with Deseret characters that both proclaimed and subverted this heritage. In his hands, the script becomes both code and ornament, a visual language reflecting Utah’s complex and often eccentric cultural identity. The Deseret Alphabet lives on as both a cultural artifact and a creative tool.