Did Nephites Have Accents?

A fellow writer posed this question to me while she was critiquing the first chapter of my second novel, In the Days of Lachoneus: Book 2 The Battle. She noted that my characters do not speak in scriptural language, which is essentially Elizabethan English. The characters talk like everyday people, and some of them even appear to have distinct speech and word patterns that sound like an accent. Did people in the Book of Mormon really have accents, she wanted to know.

Of course, the honest answer is, I don't know. The only record I am aware of in modern times of a Nephite speaking was Joseph Smith's account of his interactions with Moroni, the last Nephite prophet and the finisher of the Book of Mormon. Joseph did not quote Moroni's words directly, and he said nothing about his voice.

I have never detected an accent in any of the speeches quoted in the Book of Mormon. That does not mean, however, that the Nephites from various regions did not have dialects, accents, and specific speech patterns. What we hear mostly in the Book of Mormon is one voice: Mormon. Most of the book was compiled by Mormon from vast stores of historical records. When he recorded a person's speech, he did not write what he heard the person say directly, he wrote what he read from other records. We have a little writing from Moroni at the end, much of which, again, is abridgment of other records. We do have some first-person writing in the first part of the Book of Mormon, but even that writing is not conversation, it is composition.

On top of all of that, we have Joseph Smith's voice as the translator into English. So by the time we get the written English version of the book, any hint of accents has been expunged and sanitized by compilation, summarization, and translation.

It is like reading the talks from General Conference in the Ensign magazine. The reader would have no way of knowing from reading the written words that President Dieter F. Uchtdorf speaks with a thick German accent. Yet his distinctive voice is unmistakable to many of the Latter-day Saints who have heard him speak.

I have no reason to think the Nephites did not have accents. They populated a wide area. Isolated groups would have had only limited communication with one another. When the Mulekites joined the Nephites, the Mulekite language was completely unintelligible to the Nephites, and they had to be taught the Nephite language. Such language transitions are a rich opportunity for the development of dialects and accents.

Most modern languages have evolved into regional dialects and accompanying accents. Professor Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady, claimed he could place any individual within a few blocks of his home town by his speech. Such a fictional claim is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but even with an untrained ear, we easily distinguish people from England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, Dallas, New York, Chicago, and Salt Lake City by their accents.The same is true for Spanish speakers in Mexico, Argentina, Barcelona, and Los Angeles; German speakers in Bavaria, Hamburg, and Berlin; and French speakers in France and Canada.

So my natural response to the question, "Did Nephites have accents?" is "Why not?"