Keywords

religiolects and linguistic identity, religion-driven lexical variation, scarcity of phonetic religiolect research

Abstract

The term religiolect was coined by Benjamin Hary (1992, xiii) to describe a variety of language used by a distinct religious community, originally within the context of the Jewish linguistic spectrum. Religion has been shown to play an important role in various aspects of language, such as Arabic loanword adoption among Telugu speakers (Salami 2010), Persian loanwords and greetings among English-speaking Bahá’is (Masumian 2015), fluency in Sanskrit (Christian 1976), language choice among Hindus in the United States (Pandharipande 2010), maintenance of Hakka in East Malaysia (Ding and Goh 2020), and prevalence of linguistic fossils in Jewish Malayalam (Gamliel 2017). “Christianese,” or the variety used by evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States, features theological jargon and archaic morphosyntactic constructions (Leiter 2013; Stewart, n.d.). While the bulk of research on religiolects focuses on word choice and written forms of communication, phonetic studies of religiolect, particularly within the context of American English, are rare (e.g., Meechan 1999; Benor 2009; Baker and Bowie 2010).

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley. “The Absence of a Religiolect among Latter-day Saints in Southwest Washington.” In Valerie Fridland, Alicia Wassink, Lauren Hall-Lew, & Tyler Kendall (eds.) Speech in the Western States Volume III: Understudied Dialects (Publication of the American Dialect Society 105), 95–122. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8820642.