The professed doctrine of most denominations within the Latter Day Saint movement is that the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century translation by Joseph Smith of a record of ancient inhabitants of the American continents, written in a script which the book refers to as "Reformed Egyptian". There is no evidence of a language matching this description nor any evidence of Old World linguistic influences in the New World whatsoever.Simon G. Southerton, Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (2004, Signature Books).Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism-Shadow or Reality? (1972, Modern Microfilm Company).Statement of Smithsonian Institution regarding Book of Mormon.A Linguist Looks at Mormonism.

To support the Book of Mormon's historicity, scholars like Donald W. Parry claim that the text contains unique stylistic forms of Reformed Egyptian that Joseph Smith and his contemporaries were unlikely to have known. What is better attested to is that the Book of Mormon includes language that is anachronistic and reflective of its 19th-century and English-language origins consistent with Smith's upbringing and life experience, as well as the books and other literature published just preceding the time that the Book of Mormon was published.The Book of Mormon: Ancient or Modern.

Native American language

In 1922, LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts (1857–1933) conducted a review of the research regarding language development and dialects among the Native American peoples; the University of Illinois Press published Roberts's study posthumously in 1985 as Studies of the Book of Mormon.Brigham D. Madsen, ed., B. H. Roberts: Studies of the Book of Mormon, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Roberts based his discussion on the assumption that the majority of Native Americans descend from the peoples described in the Book of Mormon – as is implied by the hemispheric model of Book of Mormon geography, which was the prevailing view among Mormons at the time. Roberts noted that linguistic evidence among the Native American peoples does not support the Book of Mormon narrative, inasmuch as the diverse language stocks and dialects that exist would not have had enough time to develop from a single language dating from AD 400 (the approximate date of the conclusion of the Book of Mormon record). Roberts noted the following facts to be true at that point to be:

That there are a large number of separate language stocks in America that show very little relationship to each other.

That it would take a long time—much longer than that recognized as "historic times"—to develop these dialects and stocks where the development is conceived of as arising from a common source of origin—some primitive language.

That there is no connection between the American languages and the language of any people of the Old World. New World languages appear to be indigenous to the New World.

The fragmentation of language into many groups in the pre-Columbian Americas is at odds with a hemispherical geography model of the Book of Mormon’s peoples – and indeed with the Book of Mormon’s narrative of agricultural Nephites coming to the Americas and building a large-scale society. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist Jared Diamond writes that “had any food-producing Native American peoples succeeded in spreading far with their crops and livestock and rapidly replacing hunter-gatherers over a large area, they would have left legacies of easily recognized language families, as in Eurasia,” which did not occur.Guns, Germs, and Steel, pg. 370

Mainstream investigations hold that there is no known special similarity between Native American languages and ancient Egyptian.Setting the Record Straight About Native Peoples: Lost Tribes of Israel. Native Languages of the Americas. N.d. Accessed April 1, 2024

Linguistic anachronisms

A variety of linguistic anachronisms show it to be the product of nineteenth century American authorship. These anachronisms include words that represent concepts that are not known to have existed in the Americas between 2500 BC and AD 400, or in ancient Israel and Judah.

"Christ" and "Messiah" The words "Christ" and "Messiah" are used several hundred times throughout the Book of Mormon. The first instance of the word "Christ" occurs in parts of the narrative that many Mormons attribute to between 559 and 545 BC.See 2 Nephi 10:3. The first instance of the word "Messiah" occurs in the narrative that Mormons believe happened around 600 BC.1 Nephi 1:19.

"Christ" is the English transliteration of the Greek word (transliterated as Christós); it is relatively synonymous with the Hebrew word משיח, pronounced and rendered "Messiah". Both words have the meaning of "anointed", and are used in the Bible to refer to "the Anointed One". In Greek translations of the Old Testament (including the Septuagint), the word "Christ" is used for the Hebrew "Messiah", and in Hebrew translations of the New Testament, the word "Messiah" is used for the Greek "Christ".BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 50 versions and 35 languages Any passage in the Bible that uses the word "Christ" can substitute the word "Messiah" or "the Messiah" with no change in meaning (e.g., ).

The Book of Mormon uses both terms throughout the book. In the vast majority of cases, it uses the terms in an identical manner as the Bible, where it does not matter which word is used:

Richard Packham argues that the Greek word "Christ" in the Book of Mormon challenges the authenticity of the work since Smith clearly stated that "there was no Greek or Latin upon the plates from which I, through the grace of the Lord, translated the Book of Mormon."

"Church" and "synagogue"

The word "church" first occurs in 1 Nephi 4:26, where a prophet named Nephi disguises himself as Laban, a prominent man in Jerusalem whom Nephi had slain:

And he [Laban's servant], supposing that I spake of the brethren of the church, and that I was truly that Laban whom I had slain, wherefore he did follow me ().

According to the Book of Mormon, this exchange happened in Jerusalem, around 600 BC. The meaning of the word "church" in the Book of Mormon is more comparable to usage in the Bible than Modern English. The concept of a church, meaning "a convocation of believers", existed among the House of Israel prior to Christianity. For instance, Psalms speaks of praising the Lord "in the congregation of the saints"; the Septuagint contains the Greek word ecclesia for "congregation", which is also translated as "church" in the New Testament.

A similar question regards the word "synagogue", found in Alma 16:13:

And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews ().

Synagogues did not exist in their modern form before the destruction of the temple and the Babylonian captivity. The oldest known synagogue is located in Delos, Greece, and has been dated to 150 BC.The Oldest Original Synagogue Building in the Diaspora: The Delos Synagogue Reconsidered," Monika Trümper Hesperia, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October–December 2004), pp. 513–598

Other anachronisms Craig L. Blomberg has pointed out several verses in the Book Mormon apparently similar to biblical verses in the King James version of the Bible. According to Blomberg, includes overt references to , , , and were most likely written with their direct influence in mind. Furthermore, Blomberg claims that contains allusions to . Blomberg summarizes his overall position on Book of Mormon anachronisms as follows: "Indeed, the entire Book of Mormon abounds with explicit references to Christ, to his life and ministry and to the three persons of the Godhead long before New Testament times ... even though none of these concepts or terms ever appear in these forms in the Old Testament or any other ancient Jewish literature."

Stylometry

In 1980, researchers at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University used stylometric techniques they called "wordprint analysis" to examine possible Book of Mormon authorship, through statistical analysis of the occurrence of specific words and phrases. They concluded that none of the Book of Mormon selections they studied resembled writings of any of the suggested nineteenth-century authors, including Joseph Smith. Jerald and Sandra Tanner challenged these findings on various points, most notably questioning the reliability of the data sources used and the methodology of the "wordprint analysis". Additionally, D. James Croft wrote in Sunstone that there were several flaws in the methodology that were vulnerable to criticism.D. James Croft, "Book Of Mormon 'Wordprints' Reexamined", Sunstone, March 1981, vol. 6:2, pp. 15–22.

In a 1991 study for the journal History and Computing, David Holmes used a multivariate technique to analyze the Book of Mormon. Holmes used the Doctrine and Covenants and the letters and diary entries collected by Dean C. Jessee in The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith as reliable sources for Smith's writing. Holmes concluded that the Book of Mormon was produced by Joseph Smith. He noted that "the style of [Smith’s] 'prophetic voice' as evidenced by the main cluster of the textual samples studied, differs from the style of his personal writings or dictations of a personal nature."

In a 2008 peer-reviewed stylometric study published in Literary and Linguistic Computing, researchers affiliated with Stanford University used Burrows's Delta and nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) classification to compare chapters of the Book of Mormon against writings from a closed set of candidate nineteenth-century authors, including Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, Oliver Cowdery, and Parley P. Pratt, along with control authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Joel Barlow. Smith was not included in the closed set of authors, as the authors contend that no reliable corpus of Joseph Smith text could be identified with confidence.Jockers, M. L., D. M. Witten, and C. S. Criddle, 2008. "Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification". Literary and Linguistic Computing (2008) 23(4): 465–91. In contrast with Holmes's methodology, the authors argued that neither the Doctrine and Covenants nor the writings collected in The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith could be reliably treated as exclusively Smith-authored texts because of the involvement of editors and scribes, including Rigdon and Cowdery. The study reported that Rigdon most frequently received the highest or second-highest attribution probabilities across chapters of the Book of Mormon, while Spalding also showed recurrent attribution signals. The authors additionally identified a correlated Cowdery signal, particularly in the Book of Alma, where chapters attributed most strongly to Cowdery were frequently paired with Rigdon as the next most probable contributor. The authors concluded that this pattern was consistent with possible collaborative nineteenth-century authorship involving Rigdon, Spalding, and Cowdery.