The question of what Joseph Smith sounded like is not one that I’ve ever seen entertained anywhere. Of course there may or may not be a science to anatomically deducing the pitch and quality of a voice based on observation of a portion of a man’s throat, but that is not what I mean by the question (and I highly doubt such a science exists in any degree of reliability).
What I want to know is not what his voice sounded like per se but what his manner of speech sounded like. To answer this question, there exists many interesting and valuable resources.
New England, 1808
One way to reconstruct what Joseph Smith’s English sounded like is to reconstruct what early 19th century New England English sounded like.
One direct method available to us is to observe the contemporary misspellings as they often reflected a perceived pronunciation. Of course this would be a fruitless endeavor if we used a spelling sample produced by an unlearned individual who misspelled all his words. But fortunately we are in possession of a unique scholarly work by an early New England educator named Caleb Bingham. It is a book called The Child’s Companion, and it was printed in 1808 when Joseph Smith was only 3 years old (a child learning to speak). It contains a unique appendix wherein Bingham has written out the correct spellings of words often mispronounced by folks all across the Colonies, but particularly in the north, where Joseph grew up. The way he spelled the mispronounced words is indicative of the manner in which they were mispronounced.
Below is a sampling of his entries:
| Correct Spelling | Incorrect Spelling |
|---|---|
| Birth Day | Beth Day |
| Coarse | Coase |
| Eternity | Etarnity |
| Fathom | Faddom |
| Hinder | Hender |
| Law | Lor |
| Learning | Larnin |
| Miracle | Marracle |
| Pour | Power |
| Quart | Quairt |
| Says | Saze |
| Yours | Yourn |
These misspellings whose basis is 1808 New England pronunciation, along with the other examples furnished in Bingham’s book, give us an interesting peek at how people in Joseph Smith’s day thought certain spellings ought to be based on how people said them. When viewed as a whole, there is a very strong sense of modern-day Bostonian accent mixed with Appalachian. But as we will discover, that is exactly what should be expected.
Appalachia and Tangier Island
When tracing the slow evolution of the English language from pre-Colonial times to the modern varieties of American English found throughout the continent, it comes as no surprise that those secluded, undisturbed communities preserve the older strains of speaking.
Two places—one a region, the other a town—offer glimpses into such antiquated versions of English. The first is the Appalachian mountains and the people, sometimes referred to as “hillbillies,” who live there preserve the manner of speech common to the people of Colonial times. This is due to their having removed themselves into relative seclusion in the mountains during the initial expansion of the United States eastward at the beginning of the 19th century.
Though their pronunciation is often mocked as being uneducated, the people of the Appalachians actually speak in a way that was once common throughout all the states in Joseph Smith’s day. For samples of this older way of speaking watch this video:
The second place is an isolated town set on an island situated off the coast of Virginia called Tangier. The speech there is also an artifact of early Colonial speech. Of particular note is their peculiar sentence-level intonation, which is low and rumbly, and somewhat reminiscent of that New England accent so memorably used by President John F. Kennedy, itself an older form of speaking closer to that which Joseph Smith may have spoken. Watch this video to hear what Tangier English sounds like:
These modern artifacts are interesting, but do we have any way of conclusively tying this type of English to Joseph Smith?
A Recorded Witness
There is in existence a recording of speech of an actual contemporary of Joseph Smith, Wilford Woodruff, who was born in 1807 in Connecticut and spent many years in conversation with the Prophet Joseph himself. It’s not unreasonable to believe that being fellow New Englanders, Joseph and Wilford would have spoken similarly to one another. In 1897, at the age of 91, Wilford Woodruff had his testimony recorded into a “talking machine,” wherein we are able to hear that intonation of speech now familiar to us through the speakers of Tangier, Virginia. Though the recording quality is not great, one can also make out vowel differences that sound more like that of the “hillbilly” variety spoken in the Appalachians. Listen here:
What’s notable about Wilford Woodruff (and other recordings of early pioneers from the New England area) is the use of the coil-curl merger, a linguistic way to reference the way someone talks when they say words like “girl” as “goyl” (think Timothy Mouse from Disney’s Dumbo). Though it does not affect every “r” sound when speaking, certain words of phrases spoken by Woodruff are thusly inflected.
Joseph Smith’s English
Now, taking into consideration all of these relics of oral mannerisms past, we are able to reconstruct a style of English particular to Joseph Smith as he would have spoke growing up in early 19th century New England. I like to call this particular, extinct brand of English “Joseph Smith English” (JSE) as it provides an interesting, tangible, and viable connection to the words, and likeness, of the Prophet Joseph.
Below is a small table of rules I’ve compiled based on a study of the patterns and commonalities found in the several artifacts heretofore presented that will enable us to simulate JSE (note: these are not rules for writing his language but rather for speaking it):
| If… | Then… |
|---|---|
| A word begins with vowel+”L” (e.g. “election”) | Drop the leading vowel (e.g. “‘lection”) |
| A word ends with a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel (e.g. “law abiding”) | Add a -r to the end of the first word (e.g. “lar abiding”) |
| A word contains a rhotic ‘r’ (e.g. “charter” [two rhotic ‘r’s]) | *Drop rhotic ‘r’ (e.g. “cha’te’”) |
| A word contains a schwa (i.e. “uh”) | Change vowel position from mid-central to mid-frontal (i.e. “ah”) |
| A word ends in -ing (e.g. “singing”) | Drop the ‘g’ of -ing (e.g. “singin’”) |
| A word contains voiced or unvoiced interdental fricatives (i.e. “th” in “with” and “these”) | *Change to voiced or unvoiced alveolar stop, respectively (i.e. “wit” and “dese”) |
| A word has a high-frontal unrounded vowel, especially if followed by a ‘r’ (e.g. “Here”) | Change vowel position low-frontal (e.g. “Har”) |
| An irregular verb’s past tense is inflected through vowel gradation (e.g. “saw”) | *Revert to infinitive and use past participle (e.g. “see’d”) |
| A palatal glide is followed by a high-back rounded vowel (e.g. “you;” “value”) | Remove palatal glide and/or change the vowel to a high-frontal unrounded (e.g. “ye;” “valley”) |
| A word containing the spelling “-our” (e.g. “pour;” “hour;” “flour;” etc.) | Pronounce like “-ower” (e.g. “power;” “hour;” “flour;” etc.) |
| “My,” “their,” “your”, “this,” “that” | “Me,” “theirn,” “yourn,” “this-ere,” “that-are” |
| A word contains a double retroflex “-rl” somewhere in it (e.g. “world”) | *Replace with a diphthong and single retroflex (e.g. “woyld”) |
Now we must combine these rules with the peculiar intonations we heard in Appalachia and in Tangier, Virginia, to produce our full-blown JSE recreation. On the next page, I have created a small video combining our new photograph of Joseph Smith with a recording of some of his own words read in JSE. Watch the video below to “know Brother Joseph again.”
For more information on the photo of Joseph Smith used here, please see my other blog post What Did Joseph Smith Look Like?
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