Introduction

The articles in this special issue of WORD represent a selection of papers presented at the 63rd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association held at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, in 2018. The conference theme, “Language and Religion,” was conceived and brought to life by Walter Petrovitz, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Program in Classics and Linguistics at St. John’s University.

The interplay between language and religion has received little attention in this journal until now. An early exception can be found in Ferguson’s (1959) classic article “Diglossia” in Volume 15, in which he outlined the religious domain’s key role in diglossic patterns of language use such as the prestigious or “High” variety of Greek used in the New Testament and of Arabic in the Qu’rān as opposed to the “Low” varieties used in other domains such as ordinary conversation. Later work appears in Volume 44 in 1993, with articles examining sacred vocabulary in Proto-Indo-European (York 1993), structures in Indo-European prayer (Justus 1993), the clash of religious ideologies leading to transformations in Old Europe (Gimbutas 1993), and grammar change in an Amish community (Van Ness 1993). Some of these publications, coincidentally, grew out of another annual conference hosted by the ILA in 1991, “Indoeuropean and Indoeuropeans.”

Although the systematic study of the relationship between language and religion is less than twenty years old, religious belief and practice had figured prominently in linguistic research since the beginnings of the discipline. This is necessarily the case, at least to the extent that religion has played an important role in the human experience. Studies of writing systems, archaic texts, language retention, and translation theory often made reference to religion. More recent research has striven to investigate the relationship between language and religion within a comprehensive and consistent sociolinguistic framework. This has led to the development of particular areas of both single-case and comparative investigations of the ways in which language and religion interact. Recent studies have explored the role of religion in the creation of standardized orthographies; the linguistic impact of missionary activity; religious phraseology as the source of figures of speech, curses, and swear words; unique forms of religious expression, such as mantras and glossolalia; religious taboo words; and the ritualized use of sacred names and formulas. A thorough account by Darquennes and Vandenbussche (2011) of the prolific work published in the first decade of this century on the sociolinguistics of language and religion fleshes out these topics and illustrates the protean nature of frameworks and lines of research in the field.

The four articles in this issue illustrate some of the ways in which linguistic analysis can address language use in contexts of spirituality: languages used in religious practices and texts, languages in missionary settings and activities, and the relationship between language and religion under different political circumstances such as colonialism, capitalism, autocracy. Conversely, religion and religious texts serve as important sources for understanding language variation and change and migrating written forms.

One of the recurring themes during the ILA conference was the contribution of both language and religion to group identity. This is well demonstrated in the paper “The Cheke Holo: a case study from Solomon Islands on language and religion” by Fredrick Boswell, who offers a fascinating portrait of a small language community as a microcosm for the relationship between linguistic tradition and innovation. Cheke Holo is an Austronesian language of about ten thousand speakers living on the multilingual Santa Isabel island in the South Pacific. The speakers of Cheke Holo are uniformly Anglican, a fact which helps to reinforce their group identity. Boswell describes the gradual and successful process of vernacularization of both liturgy and scripture. At the same time, an attempt on the part of an SIL-affiliated linguist to reform Cheke Holo orthography foundered, although proposals are still being advanced. Boswell also considers the varying degrees of acceptance experienced by non-native clergy. In summary, he assesses the future of Cheke Holo as bright, in large part due to the close association between its speakers and their faith.

Another often-recurring topic at the conference was the importance of sacred scripture to the dissemination of religious ideas. In light of this fact, Patrick Duffley takes up the intriguing question of why Jesus himself never wrote a book. After dismissing, on scriptural evidence, the sometimes-advanced argument of Jesus’ possible illiteracy, he provides a response based on Relevance Theory, originally developed by Dan Sperber and Diedre Wilson (see Wilson & Sperber 2004). This theory holds that the linguistic meaning of utterances is underspecified and that the hearer therefore needs some way to narrow down the range of possible interpretations. The term “relevance” refers to the fact that both speaker and hearer assume that the utterance will be relevant to the communicative context. Since interpretation is based on this assumption, context is crucial. Citing the works of Charles Olsen and Walter Ong, Duffley argues that written language is decontextualized and therefore serves as an insufficient vehicle of doctrinal communication. Duffley notes, however, that, just as social history of Jewish literacy points to the importance of the spoken word in guiding believers’ understandings of sacred texts, so, too, would be the spoken words of Jesus, who chooses, in the author’s words, to “write on the tablet of the heart.”

The next article exemplifies those conference papers that analyzed sacred writings to advance understandings in historical or documentary linguistics. Charles Häberl draws primarily on scriptural sources to raise questions about the speech-writing relationship in Aramaic, a diverse family of languages with a long history. He delivers an in-depth analysis of the written forms of what prior scholarship has called “dialects” of Aramaic. Häberl argues that Aramaic is instead a “family of closely related but distinct languages” and states that assuming Aramaic to be a single, monolithic language is due largely to a previously unrecognized phenomenon known as alloglottography, where speakers of one language appropriate the scripts of a different language to develop their own writing systems. He posits that the scripts used by these distinct Aramaic languages are a result of inter-Aramaic alloglottography and provides evidence from different biblical texts to show that neither historical nor contemporary Aramaic written forms reflect the spoken forms; instead, the orthographic conventions came from another, related language. Häberl provides historical evidence for this position such as from the books of Daniel and Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible. For contemporary evidence, he turns to an extended analysis of Mandaic, an endangered language and one of the Aramaic family of languages. Mandaic is the liturgical language of the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, where some members are fluent in both its spoken and the written forms. Using several data sources, he demonstrates that certain forms in Mandaic writings do not conform to the actual sound rules in Mandaic and are therefore examples of alloglottography.

Several conference papers were dedicated to analyzing religious texts to advance our understanding about the world’s writing systems. In his article, George Jochnowitz surveys the ways in which various scripts are drawn along religious lines, taken up and modified as languages come into contact with others due to migration and displacement, or designated official state scripts by regimes of power. He argues that identity work gets foregrounded in these situations and that scripts are the focus of tensions around religion, ethnicity, and political ideologies. He illustrates these tensions with examples from mutually intelligible languages like Hindi and Urdu, which are written in different scripts based on their Hindu and Muslim religions, and Serbian and Croatian, with different scripts based on their Eastern Orthodox and Catholic religions. While noting that Jewish languages are generally written in the Hebrew alphabet, Jochnowitz provides an example of how political ideologies sometimes overpower ethnic and religious identities as in the case of Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, spoken in Turkey: Under Atatürk, both the Turkish and Ladino languages were required to change their writing systems to a Roman alphabet script. He also shows that the imposition of scripts sometimes can be overturned, as when Bengali became an official language with unique orthographic and lexical features after Bangladesh finally achieved independence. He concludes his survey by stating that “scripts can simultaneously reflect and define” religious, political and ethnic identities.

We must at this point recommend an article by Barlas (2019), published in this year’s first issue of WORD, which also was delivered at the Language and Religion conference. In her semi-autobiographical piece, “Reading the word in a foreign tongue. Islam’s scripture and non-Arab Muslims,” Asma Barlas addresses the question of how practicing Muslims who do not speak or read Arabic deal with reading the Qur’ān. In doing so, and from the perspective of “a liberatory Qur’anic hermeneutics,” she takes readers to broader questions regarding how to read the word of God. She points out that canonical interpretations of the Qur’ān and Muslim laws (the latter of which she notes are based on only 0.01% of the Qur’ān) have been in the hands of a small group of men, and she presents several words from scripture as evidence that meanings change according to both the context and the interpreter. In addition, she provides descriptions of God in the Qur’ān that describe, for example, a “just God,” a characterization that is antithetical to patriarchal interpretations, in which women are excluded. Barlas concludes her article by offering texts in which God requires tolerance of those who are not believers and which show that “religious diversity is a sign of divine providence and, at best, is meant to enable mutual recognition” (2019: 67).

The ILA is grateful to St. John’s University for hosting this annual conference, to Co-chairs Walter Petrovitz and Kathleen O’Connor-Bater for their dedication to its planning and successful realization, and to conference participants, including the authors appearing in this issue, whose work has inspired new ways of thinking about language use in the domain of religion and the supernatural.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.