Crick or Creek? Studying the Utah Accent

January 2025

Why do word pairs, like jail and gel, and feel and fill, and pin and pen, sound like one word when they roll off some Utahns’ tongues?

It’s a question that Savannah Jepson is trying to figger out, or rather, figure out. In her study of English-language accents of the western US, the linguistics major has been observing the phonology—the study of sounds in language—of an isolated community of Lapoint, Uintah County. “The locals were shocked that a linguistic study was coming to their town because nobody’s ever done a study there.”

While Jepson isn’t sharing a lot of specifics about her research due to its ongoing nature, her hypothesis is that Lapoint has preserved its phonological patterns and therefore Utah’s distinct accent, which is dying out in more populated areas of the state.

Jepson learned about Lapoint, which has a population of around 170 people, from her roommate, a native. “She’d say specific things in a way that I thought was a little quirky, and that made me really curious about the town,” she says. So, when Jepson needed a study project for her varieties of English class, she knew exactly where to go.

After that first project, Jepson’s professor told her that she could turn it into a full-scale study if she wanted to. She jumped at the chance and received a research grant from the college.

“My roommate was surprised and amused that I wanted to study her hometown. She was intrigued to know about her own accent,” says Jepson.

The two remain close friends. “She has helped me connect with people and get to know the town every step of the way.”

Trajectory-Changing Experiences

To find research participants, Jepson and her sister knocked doors in Lapoint and asked residents if they were willing to read a five-minute-long word list and be interviewed for an hour. Not everyone participated, but no one she met was bothered by her being there. “Most people were just curious,” she says.

There have been lots of studies on the Utah accent, but most have been done in the state’s populated areas, Jepson says. “I’m the only linguist I know of that has conducted sociolinguistic research in the Uintah Basin.”

She is currently looking into why speakers with a Utah accent handle diphthongs (single-syllable multiple-vowel sounds) the way they do.

Originally Jepson figured that someday she’d be an English teacher. “This project made me realize I want to get into grad school and research language features,” she says. “I love constantly learning, and the idea of doing research for the rest of my life is amazing.”

Long term, Jepson aims to become a field researcher with a focus on recording and preserving undocumented and endangered languages. “This project sent me on a trajectory that I never thought I was going to go down, and I’m so excited about that.”