Ryan Shosted

Ryan K. Shosted is co-author of The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound. He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he directs the Chin-Woo Kim Phonetics Laboratory. Trained at Brigham Young University and UC Berkeley, he studies how sound systems work and how they change over time. His writing brings linguistic analysis to the Deseret Alphabet and to questions of language, literacy, and belief in early Latter-day Saint history. He served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Florianópolis, Brazil. Outside academia, he is an amateur boxer and holds two Chicago Golden Gloves championship belts in the Masters Division.