Volume 2013, Issue 220 - Religion and Language

This article combines contemporary work in social bibliography, translation theory and Buddhist studies to focus on two questions. First, what exactly does the act of “reading” sutras entail? And second, what is the precise relation between material sign and acoustic sound in Buddhist recitation? Answers to these questions are necessarily inextricably bound to local contexts and communities. The so-called ‘pictorial Heart Sutras’ (Jp: esetsu Shinkyō ) of early modern Japan provide the particular aperture through which I pursue these queries. Following D. F. McKenzie, I understand the pictorial sutras “not simply as verbal constructs but as social products” (1999: 127) which may be examined to reveal patterns of textual engagement, practices of translation and particular techniques for associating the quotidian world of rice paddies and rounded bellies with the abiding realm of religious doctrine. In particular, I argue that the pictorial sutras develop a “visual vernacular” whose lexicon evinces an abiding interest in fecundity and a belief in the apotropaic value of sutra reading.

In this article we examine the role played by one key sacred text in children's learning in four faith communities in London (Bangladeshi British Muslim, Tamil Hindu, Ghanaian Pentecostal and Polish Catholic). After situating the study within a sociocultural framework, we show how collaborative ethnography offers insights into how children begin to make collective memories their own in a new country. We focus particularly on the importance of practice and performance leading to the perfection required by the faith. Through multimodal approaches including song, dance, gesture and chant, as well as repetition, recitation, echoing and memorization, the children imbibe the texts and learn them “by heart”. Finally, we show how living in a new country results in a syncretism of language, literacy and learning practices which contributes to the dynamic nature of each faith in London.

Studies on language and religion in the Arab world have generally focused on dialectal variation between different religious communities within specific countries (cf. Abu-Haidar 1991; Holes 1984). This study, on the other hand, tries to show how Muslim religious figures exploit the diglossic situation in Egypt in their sermons in order to convey social messages more effectively to their target audience. I focus on patterns of language use within the Muslim religious community by examining cases of code-switching between SA (standard Arabic) and ECA (Egyptian colloquial Arabic) in mosque sermons. The study references indexicality (Woolard 2004) and markedness theory (Myers-Scotton 1998, 2005) in its theoretical framing, and analyses the discourse function of and social motivations for exploiting the diglossic situation in these sermons. It aims to show how Islamic preachers can manipulate the linguistic situation to convey a religious message.

The rapid expansion of Islam in the seventh century was accompanied by another intriguing, little-studied phenomenon: the spread of the Arabic language. Within a century after the death of Muhammad in 632, Arabic had become the language of an extensive empire. As Arabic spread to a convert population, scholars became horrified by what they saw as a wide-scale corruption of the language, and wholesale educational efforts began. The article discusses the process by which these efforts unfolded. First, Bedouins were identified as the keepers of the original “pure” Arabic, and they were encouraged to flock to the cities and teach there. As the limitations of this method became apparent, the more scientific study of the language was born. In time, philologists came to be seen as on par with and even superseding the Bedouin in terms of language. Subsequently, more formal schooling efforts began to take place at mosques and schools. Throughout the centuries, as educational efforts expanded, the connections between piety and Arabic mastery strengthened. However, there was an incongruity in the fact that studies of the Arabic language came to be developed mainly by the foreign converts themselves, and the final portion of the article analyzes this tension.

This article investigates the impact of religion on language. Since religions (or secularisms) are intrinsic parts of human society and communication, every linguistic variety may be analyzed for its religious characteristics and described as a religiolect, a spoken and/or written language variety employed by a religious (or secularized) community, typically of a specific region. Our starting point is an analysis of Jewish-defined languages: wherever Jews have wished to distinguish themselves from their neighbors or have been encouraged or forced to do so, depending on majority-minority dynamics, they developed distinct linguistic elements in their speech and writings. Jewish languages, however, were never an isolated phenomenon. We have tracked several instances where Christians and Muslims have adopted Jewish linguistic usages. Moreover, not only did Christians and Muslims enter the Jewish linguistic spectrum in some places, they also created their own (equally porous) religiolects, or Christian- and Muslim-defined languages. The model of Jewish-defined religiolects can thus be applied to other religious settings, exporting theory developed in a “minority” field to general disciplines or other “minority” fields. This article maps out a prototype of a Jewish-defined language and, most importantly, applies this prototype to Christian- and Muslim-defined languages.

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.

Syncretism has been a profound influence on Guatemalan society of which it has been a part since early Spanish colonization in the 16th Century. Both the incorporation and application of Spanish borrowings, as well as notions of Catholic doctrine in ritual Kaqchikel speech can be seen as a permanent process of religious, cultural, economic and social contact. The spiritual concepts of Kaqchikel traditionalist believers and their representative confraternities in San Juan Sacatepéquez have been transmitted and preserved during these five centuries through their prayers. The prayers are characterized by a high rhetorical style of formal language, a wide variety of invocations to the Christian God and Catholic saints and use of Spanish borrowings, none of which have apparently eclipsed this indigenous oral traditional genre. Certain literary figures typical of Mesoamerican ritual speech, such as parallelism, diphrasism and other types of repetitions, continue to appear in the prayers. In the present study, we analyze this ritual speech form from its literary and linguistic aspects, as well as the “inner view” of the confraternity members of San Juan Sacatepéquez. We focus on syncretism in the prayers to better understand how the confraternities have conserved their indigenous spirituality despite pressure from the Catholic Church.

The arrival of Protestantism in mid-sixteenth century France prompted the redefinition of an emerging national identity hitherto built around the twin concepts of inherent national Catholicism and monarchical legitimacy. In the popular writing of the day, poets deliberately used overtly nationalistic languages of weaponry, fidelity and treason to define religious groups. This article traces the evolution of languages of loyalty, treason and war in the exchange of polemical poems between Pierre de Ronsard and his protestant critics and discusses their efficiency in establishing enduring tropes which outlived the sixteenth century. It argues that Catholic and Protestant poets subverted the medieval image of France as the “most Christian” nation to achieve the vilification of their religious opponents, establishing a religious core to national identity which sustained French life up to and beyond the Revolution. It then considers the reflection of civil unrest in the use of languages of war and weaponry. Enabling men who were not soldiers to “fight” away from the battlefield, it also saw poets engaging in single combat in the defence of their faith, consciously referring to the codified rules of the duel.