A Corpus-Driven Exploration of Language Use in Religious Discourse

Document Type : Research Article

Author

Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Middle East University, Amman, Jordan

Abstract

Sociolinguistic research has shown that religion has been in an intertwined relationship with language. However, the interaction between language and religion, especially in less institutional contexts such as prayer sites, has not received much attention. To address this issue, this study explores language use in religious discourse in multilingual settings. The study uses corpus linguistics techniques accompanied by a discourse analysis approach to investigate using Arabic in 182 English Friday sermons delivered at a New Zealand on-campus prayer site. The analysis shows that despite the presence of Arabic words in the corpus, the English equivalents of these words are also found. The analysis also shows that Arabic words are mainly either nouns or used in formulaic phrases. This study suggests that Arabic is used as an emblem of religious identity. This study contributes to the current scholarship by bringing together multilingualism research and corpus linguistics in under-researched contexts.

Keywords


Abed Elkhalik, D. (2018). Family language policies in five Syrian families in the UK. Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, 11, 1–18.
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press.
Ahmad, S. A., Almsafir, M. K., & Siron, R. (2013). Using Arabic words in Malaysia Takaful industry and impact on untapped Malay market. Journal of Islamic and Human Advanced Research, 3(10), 740–761.
Al Shlowiy, A. S. (2019). Language, religion, and communication: The case of Islam and Arabic in the Asia-Pacific. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 5(4), 109-139. https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00040.shl
Alaiyed, M. (2018). Diglossic code-switching between Standard Arabic and Najdi Arabic in religious discourse. [Unpublished doctoral dissertaton]. Durham University. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12578/
Albirini, A., & Chakrani, B. (2017). Switching codes and registers: An analysis of heritage Arabic speakers’ sociolinguistic competence. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(3), 317–339.
Al-Khafaji, R. (2005). Variation and recurrence in the lexical chains of Arabic and English texts. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 40, 5–25.
Alsaawi, A. (2020). The use of language and religion from a sociolinguistic perspective. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Online first. https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.00039.als.
Alsaif, R., & Starks, D. (2018). Medium and domains in the linguistic landscapes of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40(1), 14–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2018.1461874.
Al-Tarafi, A. (2016). You think you know Islam? Xlibris.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
Anderson, D., Mathys, H., & Cook, T. (2015). Religious beliefs, knowledge, and teaching actions: Elementary teacher candidates and world religions. Religion & Education, 42(3), 268–288.
Anthony, L. (2017). AntFileConverter (Version 1.2.1.) [Computer software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.
Archer, D., Culpeper, J., & Davies, M. (2008). Pragmatic annotation. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 614–642). Walter de Gruyter.
Baker, P. (2010). Sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., & McEnery, T. (2013). Sketching Muslims: A corpus driven analysis of representations around the word ‘Muslim’ in the British press 1998–2009. Applied Linguistics, 34(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams048.
Baker, P., Lie, M., McEnery, T., & Sebba, M. (2000). The construction of a corpus of spoken Sylheti. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 15(4), 421–432. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/15.4.421.
Bassiouney, R. (2009). Arabic sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/j.ctt1r29z0.
Brink‐Danan, M. (2015). Faith in conversation: Translation, translanguaging, and the British God Debate. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 25(2), 173–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12088.
Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in academic writing: Identifying teachable strategies of translanguaging. Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01207.x.
Chew, P. G. (2006). Language use and religious practice: The case of Singapore. In J. Fishman & T. Omoniyi (Eds.), Explorations in the sociology of language and religion (pp. 213–234). John Benjamins.
Chew, P. G. (2014). Language choice and religious identities in three Singaporean madrasahs. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 229, 49−65.
Clyne, M. (2003). Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages. Cambridge University Press.
Cummings, W. (2001). Scripting Islamization: Arabic texts in early modern Makassar. Ethnohistory, 48(4), 559–586.
ElShiekh, A., & Saleh, M. (2011). Translation versus transliteration of religious terms in contemporary Islamic discourse in western communities. International Journal of English Linguistics, 1(2), 141–147. https://doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v1n2p141.
Errihani, M. (2011). Managing religious discourse in the mosque: The end of extremist rhetoric during the Friday sermon. The Journal of North African Studies, 16(3), 381–394. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2010.515411.
Ferguson, C. (1982). Religious factors in language spread. In R. Cooper (Ed.), Language spread: Studies in diffusion and social change (pp. 95–106). Indiana University Press.
Flowerdew, L. (2004). The argument for using English specialized corpora to understand academic and professional language. In U. Connor & T. Upton (Eds.), Discourse in the professions: Perspectives from corpus linguistics (Vol. 11, pp. 11–33). John Benjamins.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup bias: The common ingroup identity model. Psychology Press.
Gierlinger, E. (2015). ‘You can speak German, sir’: On the complexity of teachers’ L1 use in CLIL. Language and Education, 29(4), 347–368.
Gogonas, N. (2012). Religion as a core value in language maintenance: Arabic speakers in Greece. International Migration, 50(2), 113–129.
Green, N., & Searle-Chatterjee, M. (Eds.). (2008). Religion, language, and power. Routledge.
Haider, A. (2016). A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the Arab uprisings: Evidence from the Libyan case [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Canterbury.
Haider, A. (2018). Using corpus linguistic techniques in (critical) discourse studies reduces but does not remove bias: Evidence from an Arabic corpus about refugees. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 55(1), 89–133.
Haider, A., & Hussein, R. (2019). Analysing headlines as a way of downsizing news corpora: Evidence from an Arabic–English comparable corpus of newspaper articles. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 35(4), 826–844.
Halim, W. (2018). Islamization or Arabization? The Arab cultural influence on the South Sulawesi Muslim community since the Islamization in the 17th Century. SUVANNABHUMI, 10(1), 35–61.
Harmaini, F. (2014). Code-switching and religious identity: The status of Arabic language in the eyes of non-Arab Muslims. Proceeding of the Global Summit on Education GSE, 332–342.
Husen, A. A. (2011). A new understanding of heritage: A case study of non-Arab Muslims in the Arabic classroom [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Texas: The USA.
Jaspal, R., & Coyle, A. (2010). “Arabic is the language of the Muslims–that’s how it was supposed to be”: Exploring language and religious identity through reflective accounts from young British-born South Asians. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 13(1), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13674670903127205.
Karan, M. (2011). Understanding and forecasting ethnolinguistic vitality. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32(2), 137–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2010.541916.
Kearney, J. (2004, January 28). 'My God is your God'. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/opinion/my-god-is-your-god.html.
Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press.
Liddicoat, A. J. (2014). Language approaches in the public practice of religion. International Conference on Language and Religion. A Conference at the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures University of South Australia.
Macalister, J. (2003). The presence of Māori words in New Zealand English [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Victoria University of Wellington: New Zealand.
Macalister, J. (2007). Weka or woodhen? Nativization through lexical choice in New Zealand English. World Englishes, 26(4), 492–506.
McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.
Nofal, M. (2020). Multilingual practices and identity negotiation among multilingual heritage language learners in New Zealand [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Victoria University of Wellington: New Zealand.
Nolte, M. I., Ancarno, C., & Jones, R. (2018). Inter-religious relations in Yorubaland, Nigeria: Corpus methods and anthropological survey data. Corpora, 13(1), 27–64.
Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. Longman.
Revis, M. S. (2017). How religious ideologies and practices impact on family language policy: Ethiopians in Wellington. In J. Macalister & S. H. Mirvahedi (Eds.), Family language policies in a multilingual world: Opportunities, challenges, and consequences (pp. 135–153). Routledge.
Scott, M. (2012). WordSmith Tools (Version 6) [Computer software]. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software. Available from https://www.lexically.net/downloads/version8/HTML/proc_tag_handling.htm.
Seals, C. (2017). Analyzing the linguistic landscape of mass-scale events. Linguistic Landscape, 3(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.17012.sea.
Shokri, A., Khany, R., & Aliakbari, M. (2022). Two decades of research articles keywords in
corpus-based studies in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics, 13(1), 70-83. https://doi.org/10.22055/RALS.2022.17426.
Spolsky, B. (2003). Religion as a site of language contact. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23, 81–94.
Spolsky, B. (2009). Language Management. Cambridge University Press.
The Royal Society of New Zealand. (2013). Languages in Aotearoa New Zealand. Wellington: The Royal Society of New Zealand.
Versteegh, K. (2014). Arabic language (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press.
Volf, M. (2011). Allah: A Christian response. Harper Collins Publishers.
Volf, M. (Ed.). (2012). Do we worship the same God?: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Weisser, M. (2016). Practical corpus linguistics: An introduction to corpus-based language analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
Welji, H. (2012). Adding Allah to alhamdulilah: The use of Arabic God-phrases for performative functions [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of California San Deigo.
Yurisovna, Y., & Alikberova, R. (2019). A corpus-based contrastive analysis among Russian and Korean languages: In reference to Admiral E. Putyatin’s contribution. Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics, 10, 1282-1288. 10.22055/rals.2019.15371.