Introduction

Book of Mormon research relating to language—such as that of B. H. Roberts and Hugh Nibley and studies on Hebraisms and chiasmus—has focused on the language of the text, with scholars proposing various ideas about the languages of Lehi and his descendants. The missing elephant not in the room is what today’s descendant Lehite languages might have to say about Lehi’s languages. Fortunately, language families cannot be fabricated, nor can numerous lexical correspondences shared by thousands of speakers of related languages be susceptible to hoax or dismissed as coincidence. The challenge is that assembling and analyzing thousands of data points across dozens of related languages requires lifetimes as linguists reconstruct the ancient proto-language from the related living languages descended from it.

B. H. Roberts was understandably disappointed not to find language evidence for Lehi in the Americas, though the data had only begun to be gathered by his day. That presumed lack is often attributed to Lehi’s posterity being swallowed up by America’s already-sizable populations and language families, which certainly happened to many Lehite lines. Curious, I investigated most of the 190 language families of the Americas and found much Semitic and Egyptian in Uto-Aztecan. I also found lesser hints diffused into very few other language families, maybe 3 percent of the 190, the latter number suggesting many origins for America’s Indigenous populations.