Author Date

2023-8

Degree Name

Department

Linguistics

College

Humanities

Defense Date

2023-06-23

Publication Date

2023-08-04

First Faculty Advisor

Joey Stanley

Keywords

linguistics, sociolinguistics, missionary voice, prosody

Abstract

Can members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consistently identify the so-called “missionary voice”? That is, when presented with a series of unidentified speech samples that are a mix of currently serving young missionaries and their college-aged peers, how accurate will they be at selecting missionaries from the lineup? Additionally, what features (prosodic and otherwise) make the missionary voice distinct? That is, which characteristics of missionary speech most strongly index it as such? In this paper, I seek to answer both of these questions through a sociolinguistic lens (and, in part, via the tools of perceptual dialectology). I discuss the results of a 21-question survey I conducted to determine whether respondents could reliably distinguish the missionaries’ speech samples from the non-missionaries’. Although the survey’s results were statistically inconclusive, I argue that much can be learned about the nature of this sociolect through a careful qualitative examination of respondents’ short-answer descriptions detailing what they believe constitutes the missionary voice. I then compare these descriptions to my own impressionistic analysis of the missionaries’ speech samples to determine which of the identified features were most salient to the respondents’ decision-making process.