The Missionary Voice
A sociolinguistic exploration of missionaries' speech
Image credit: Beck Seamons
Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from Josh’s recently published undergraduate honors thesis. Interested readers may access his full paper here: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/studentpub_uht/322/.
As a discipline, sociolinguistics is concerned primarily with situating language in the broader social world. Sociolinguists thus seek to account for the patterns of variation that emerge when the rules of our internal grammars—intricate systems for constructing well-formed words, phrases, and sentences which we acquire as very young children, in the case of our native language(s)—collide with the various identities we hold in that social world. Among them are age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. While these sorts of identities, or variables, are frequently examined in sociolinguistic studies, Hary (2011) notes that “an important variable, often overlooked [by sociolinguists and others], is religious affiliation and identity” (43). Membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is, I believe, one such overlooked religious variable. In what follows, I offer an account of the collision between the English language and an identity, that of “full-time missionary,”1 held by a particular subset of the Latter-day Saint population.
In early January 2022, my sister Megan—then serving as a missionary for the LDS Church in Finland—sent me a voice memo (transcribed below) about another voice memo that she had recently received from a childhood friend who was also on a mission at the time. Megan’s words anecdotally illustrate the sense I’d had that something interesting was happening at the nexus of missionary culture and language:
Oh my gosh Josh, OK [my friend] just sent me a voice memo and I can’t. It doesn’t sound like her. She changed to a “missionary voice.” It is insane. I can’t even explain it. Oh my gosh, like at first I didn’t even recognize it was her. I just want to submit [her] voice memo to you. I can’t even listen to it; it’s painful because she’s so cute but it sounds—. (Her voice then trails off.)
Of course, Megan was not the first to have noticed or commented on missionaries’ unique speaking style. I have heard others complain many times about this particular voice, as well as other unique modes of speech that Latter-day Saints can adopt when speaking or teaching publicly. These other styles include the “spirit voice,” “Relief Society2 voice,” and even the “CES3 voice.” Impressionistically, the most prominent among all these voices—at least in terms of how often it is referenced in casual conversation—is the missionary voice. This makes sense, as the LDS missionary corps has a much broader demographic reach than either the Relief Society or Church Educational System do.
My focus here is thus the missionary voice. By the term, I specifically mean the unique mode of speech some native English-speaking members of the LDS Church seem to adopt when in particular ecclesiastical settings. Although the name of the voice itself suggests only one such setting—that of full-time, volunteer missionary service—in my observation, former missionaries can at times slip back into this vocal setting while speaking from the pulpit or teaching a lesson during Sunday school. However, in this study, I concentrated exclusively on the voice as realized by currently serving young4 missionaries. One final terminological caveat: although some sociolinguists would perhaps label this phenomenon a register5 or dialect (or even—most specifically—a sociolect,6), I will not make a judgment here. For now, the more generic term voice will suffice.
But what exactly do I mean linguistically by the term missionary voice? While it lacks a rigorous definition for now, from my experience in the LDS Church, I would say that it generally involves at least the three following things: 1) the utilization of intonational patterns typical of questions when making declarative statements,7 2) relatively frequent pausing, perhaps for spiritual effect (regardless of why it’s done, the pausing frequency helps to differentiate missionary speech from an everyday conversational tone), and 3) pronunciation of words such as family and prophet with an inflection reminiscent of Utah English. Overall, it seems that the missionary voice is primarily a prosodic8 phenomenon, although the voice has salient characteristics on the segmental (i.e., involving individual speech sounds), suprasegmental, lexical, and perhaps even grammatical levels.9
Despite the frequency of my coreligionists’ complaints, no one has yet provided a robust linguistic definition of the missionary voice or, more importantly, verified that members can consistently identify those who are speaking this sociolect. In this study, then, I ask two related questions: 1) Can members of the church consistently identify the missionary voice? That is, when presented with several unidentified speech samples—some from currently serving missionaries, others from non-missionaries—how accurate will the given church members be at selecting missionaries from the lineup? 2) What features (phonological—specifically prosodic—and otherwise) make the missionary voice distinct?
Linguists are increasingly interested in documenting the full range of human language variation. Much like there has been a push to recognize and appreciate diversity in other academic realms, so too have linguists felt the call to more fully acknowledge linguistic variety, in all its many forms. While this project doesn’t involve documenting a dying indigenous language or preserving an overlooked regional American English dialect—important, more traditional ways of acknowledging linguistic diversity—I nonetheless believe that coming to a better understanding of what sets Latter-day Saint missionary speech apart (no pun intended)10 is one important way of both acknowledging linguistic diversity and studying the fascinating yet under-explored overlap between religion and language.
1Latter-day Saint missionaries are religious volunteers who devote all of their time to proselytizing—sharing the LDS Church’s Christian message—and community service. Young men serve for a period of two years, while young women serve for 18 months. Missionaries are generally between the ages of 18 and 26.
2The Relief Society is the LDS Church’s global women’s organization.
3This initialism refers to the LDS Church Educational System, of which Brigham Young University is a part.
4Some retired couples also choose to serve administrative or humanitarian missions for the church; they rarely spend significant time proselytizing, however, and I will not be examining their unique modes of speech (if any) here.
5The overlap between these terms in the relevant literature is, in any case, significant. As the Wikipedia entry on register notes, “Discourse categorization is a complex problem, and even in the general definition of register given above (language variation defined by use rather than user), there are cases where other kinds of language variation, such as regional or age dialect, overlap. Due to this complexity, scholarly consensus has not been reached for the definitions of terms such as register, field, or tenor; different scholars’ definitions of these terms are often in direct contradiction with each other” (Wikipedia 2023).
6Romaine (2000) provides a helpful framework for understanding where sociolects (or as she labels them, “social dialects”) fit within the broader concept of “dialect.” She notes: “the study of dialects or dialectology has to do with boundaries, which often coincide with geographical features such as rivers and mountains. Boundaries are, however, often of a social nature, e.g. between different social class groups. In this case we may speak of ‘social dialects.’ Social dialects say who we are, and regional dialects where we come from” (Romaine 2000: 2).
7This phenomenon is known as uptalk, or, as linguists have more formally labeled it, high rising terminal (HRI).
8Prosody involves the study of phonological phenomena above the level of individual speech sounds like rhythm, intonation, and stress.
9Some Latter-day Saints have noted that missionaries are especially attentive to prescriptive grammatical rules and “sounding correct.”
10]Missionaries are formally blessed by their regional church leader (someone equivalent to the bishop of a Catholic diocese) before beginning their term of service. This blessing is referred to as being “set apart.”