Religious Language

Abstract

The effort to know and interact with an otherworld tends to demand highly marked uses of linguistic resources. In contrast to less marked speech situations, in religious contexts the sources of words, as well as the identity, agency, authority, and even the very presence of participants in an interaction, can be especially problematic. Different religious practices alter any of a variety of formal and pragmatic features of everyday language in response to their distinctive assumptions about the world, otherworlds, and the beings they contain. These practices are also mediated by speakers' assumptions about the nature and workings of language. Because such assumptions bear on the presumed nature of human and nonhuman subjects, religious debates often dwell on details of verbal and textual practice. The study of religious language touches on more general problems concerning relations among performance, text, and context. It also reveals chronic tensions between transcendence and the situated nature of practices, with implications for the nature of agency and belief.