Language and Lingo Specific to Utah

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Jenny. I’m calling from beautiful southern Utah.

And I had a thought the other day as I was listening to one of your shows.

Nice. Let’s hear it. So, you know, when people call in and ask about different phrases or sayings, it’s always the Deep South or Appalachia, or maybe, you know, New England area.

So here in Utah, do we have words that come from the Mountain West? Or what’s our dialect that’s unique to Utah area?

That’s a good question.

And that’s where you live, I take it.

So I actually consider myself in the desert southwest. But most of Utah would be the Mountain West, correct?

Yeah.

The dialect regions out west tend to be very wide anyway. They’re not as narrow as the East because people haven’t, English speakers, haven’t settled the West for as long and haven’t had a chance to differentiate their dialects as long.

So they’re a little less well-defined in the West. But there are things that have happened out there.

Let’s start with food because that’s always a fun place to start talking about language. Let me ask you if you’ve ever baked funeral potatoes.

Well, I do not like to call them that, but yes, I have.

All right. Well, that name. And we use fry sauce a lot as well.

Yeah. Fry sauce. A funeral. What is it you said? We use the fry sauce.

Fry sauce.

Yeah. Funeral potatoes and fry sauce.

So for those who don’t know, funeral potatoes are a baked casserole dish of shredded potatoes and cheese and canned cream of mushroom or chicken soup, sour cream, onions, maybe put potato chips on top.

And then fry sauce is basically, what is it, mayo and ketchup mixed together?

Yeah, mayo or ketchup. And both of those are very particular to Utah, although you might find them in surrounding states.

And also in Utah, there’s a type of scone, which isn’t at all like the English scone. Do you eat those?

We eat fry bread.

Yeah, it’s like fry bread, but it’s called a scone.

Yeah, I know that when I was younger, we talked a lot about the scones. And as, you know, the older we get, I think I see scone less and fried bread more.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because there’s so many in the surrounding states, they just use fried bread, which is what they get from Native American cultures and peoples.

Do you know dirty sodas?

Oh, Utah is known for their soda. This is where they take a soda and you mix, you put in syrups or creams and maybe fruit.

And particularly the local chains will do it. It’s not even just like a thing you do at home. You can just go to the chain store or the chain restaurants and buy them.

Yeah, like Starbucks or, you know, Dutch Brothers across the road. We have soda sauce every corner.

So right there, that’s a passel of food terms that are specific to that part of the country.

But the other thing that happens in that part of the country is stuff related to geography. Because you have all over the Mountain West, so maybe not so much in Utah, but you have 14ers.

These are mountains above 14,000 feet. So you’ll find that particularly in Colorado. You have things like Pow Day or Powder Day. This is the day everyone goes skiing after really good snow, right?

Correct.

You have Red Rock. This is the red sandstone, which gives you those fantastic parks in Utah. And that kind of rhetoric is not really well known around the rest of the country.

And then we have things like vowel mergers. So this is a little more linguistic-y and a little harder to grasp. But there’s something that happens in that part of the country.

It happens elsewhere, too. But it’s notable in Utah and Idaho that words like heel, H-E-L-L, and hill, H-I-L-L, can sound alike, where they might not sound alike in the rest of the country.

My father-in-law, he uses the word cord, C-O-R-D, with an A, C-A-R-D.

So it sounds like?

He says, go plug in the card.

Card.

Yeah, there we go. That’s a great representation of dialect features for some parts of the country.

Right. He wasn’t born in a barn.

Barn in a born, right? My grandmother said that.

Barn in a born?

We could talk about the influence of Spanish on the language, even just talking about Butte versus Mesa, which represents the Anglophone settlements versus the Hispanophone settlements.

We could talk about the Latter-day Saints’ influence on the language, things like wards. There’s so much more we could talk about that is happening linguistically in that part of the country.

So there’s a lot going on. But thank you so much for your call and talking to us and sharing your stories of what it’s like there.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Bye, Jenny.

Bye.

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