Linguistic, religious and national loyalties in Alsace
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Katharina Vajta
Abstract
In Alsace, a confessionally mixed region with a Catholic majority and quite a large Protestant minority, religion and language have habitually been considered stronger cultural identity markers than national belonging. Since the Reformation, Lutheranism has traditionally been linked to Germany and the German language, while Catholicism has often been seen as connected to France and French. The present article investigates salient linguistic, religious and national features in this French border region, mainly drawn from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Furthermore, an account of interviews conducted with a Lutheran Alsatian family makes clear that these matters are still of immediate interest. The informants provide an illustration of how religion still influences language use, linguistic choices and cultural identity, and how it may contribute both to language maintenance and to the ongoing language shift from the Germanic varieties (German and Alsatian) to French.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Reading language and religion together
- Reading by heart: translated Buddhism and the pictorial Heart Sutras of Early Modern Japan
- Practice, performance and perfection: learning sacred texts in four faith communities in London
- The social motivation of code-switching in mosque sermons in Egypt
- Education efforts in the dissemination of Medieval Arabic
- Religiolinguistics: on Jewish-, Christian- and Muslim-defined languages
- Linguistic, religious and national loyalties in Alsace
- Maintenance of Kaqchikel ritual speech in the confraternities of San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala
- “D'une plume de fer sur un papier d'acier”: faith, nationalism and war in the poetry of the first French War of Religion
- Book Review
