Maybe you’ve heard it in Sunday School lessons or following a polite knock at your door—the pleasant, gentle, reverent cadence of a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Missionary voice”—often described as having long and frequent pauses and a pitch that lifts at the end of each sentence (aka “uptalk”)—caught the interest of Joshua Q. Stevenson (BA ’23), a former BYU linguistics student who explored the phenomenon in a term paper.
With the help of linguistics professors Joseph A. Stanley (BA ’13) and Wendy Baker Smemoe (BA ’91, MA ’95), Stevenson grew the project into an honors thesis and eventually a paper published by the Linguistic Society of America.
It’s common knowledge, says Stanley, that people speak differently in different situations. “The way a
stake president speaks in stake conference is not the same as how he would speak if you were to see him at the bowling alley.” Linguists call these differences in speech “registers.”
We adapt and construct spoken registers based on the identity, or persona, we associate with, Stanley adds. “In the case of missionary voice, we want to portray that we are good and faithful missionaries, that we have the Spirit with us.”
The researchers collected data by asking people from Utah and members of the Church what they thought about missionary voice. Two-thirds agreed that missionary voice is real. One survey respondent attributed it to missionaries trying to “become the idealized version of a [Latter-day Saint] at all times, and in all things, and in all places, because they’re representatives of the Church,” Stevenson quotes. “Their speech reflects that.”
Another participant, Smemoe recalls, “said it sounds like a beautiful ray of sunshine.”
The researchers then tested if people could tell the difference between recordings of missionaries and college students. While participants couldn’t pick out the missionaries by speech alone, they were able to identify elements of missionary voice—such as fewer filler words, deliberate speech, and “smiley voice” (talking while smiling).
Their work may confirm the existence of a distinct missionary register, but the researchers emphasize that sounding like a missionary doesn’t mean you’re more spiritual—or that you’re faking spirituality. “It’s just the linguistics equivalent of knowing how to iron your white shirt,” says Stanley.
Stevenson adds that “there is no one right way to speak as a missionary. As long as you’re trying to be sincere and speaking from the heart, with the Spirit, it’s going to work out.”
