Introduction

The articles in this special issue ofWORD represent a selection of papers presented at the 63rd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association held at St. John’s University in Queens, NewYork, 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 ProtoIndo-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.