Some Forms of Religious Discourse
Every speech community includes in its linguistic repertoire particular »forms of discourse« which have characteristic internal, i. e. linguistic, structure and characteristic patterns of use, i. e. sociolinguistic contexts in which they are appropriate.
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Charles A. Ferguson 1.1 Every speem community includes in its linguistic repertoire particular »forms of discourse« whim have maracteristic internal, i. e. linguistic, structure and maracteristic patterns of use, i. e. sociolinguistic contexts in which they are appropriate. Examples of sum forms of discourse might include sum varied phenomena as polite formulas of greeting, epic poems, ritual mantras, scientific papers, or children's counting-out rhymes. Sum forms of discourse have been studied for centuries by literary critics, literary historians, folklorists, and others, and a wealth of descriptive and interpretive material is available on a very wide range of sum forms at various levels of generality and in differing classifications. With increasingly sophisticated tools of linguistic analysis becoming available, new lines of internal analysis of forms of discourse open up, and current linguistic researm is slowly extending itself into the analysis of forms of discourse (e. g. Longacre 1972). Similarly new approames to the study of the use of language offer paradigms of analysis for the role of forms of discourse in socio-cultural systems (e. g. Hymes 1967). In the present paper I would like to encourage students of human langnage behavior to utilize these new possibilities for the analysis of forms of religious discourse in various societies and from different perspectives, and to offer a fragmentary analysis of certain language phenomena of contemporary English-speaking Christian communities as a sample. Just as any social distinctions within a speem community will tend to be reflected in the structure of the language(s) of the community, it may be assumed that religious identity will tend to be reflected linguistically in the dimensions of social dialect variation. In some communities this kind of variation may be quite pervasive, as in the phonological, grammatical, and lexical differences in the Arabic of the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Baghdad (cf. Blanc 1964). Although often the differences are less marked than in Baghdad this kind of differentiation is widespread in the world although only occasionally analyzed in any detail (e. g. Cohen 1964, Dil1972). Even in American society where sum differentiation seems to be minimal there are linguistic features which tend to correlate with religious identity, sum as the ladt of n-ng contrast in the speech of many American Jews whose non-Jewish neighbours have it, or the use of Latinate vocabulary items sum as prescind in the writings of Roman Catholic academics and not in the writings of their non-Catholic colleagues. Interesting G. Dux et al. (eds.), Zur Theorie der Religion / Sociological Theories of Religion © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 1973
Some Forms o/ Religious Discourse
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and suggestive though such dialectal variation may be, it is not the subject of this paper. Closer to our topic is the notion of «register». Registral variation in language is associated with differences in topic, mode of use, situation, roles of the participants and the l
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