Languages and Religion

When someone talks about religion, at the same time, and not being aware of it, he may be also talking about Languages.   Religions are connected to specific languages, not only because people need a language to communicate or to say or think their prayers;  the sacred texts and the rituals are originally written in a specific language. My interaction and being present in different religious ceremonies from different groups also lead me to experience that to better understand some passages of the sacred texts, it is necessary to be aware of some particularities of the language used in its composition.

This article will speak about the languages related with the religions. I am going to use only some religions as example, mainly the ones I have been in contact. I am not going to discuss religious texts or what each religion teach, I am going to speak about languages.

Christianity

 Christianity is a very multilingual religion, starting from the point that the Bible, its main sacred text, is composed by texts originally written in 3 languages:  Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek.

Although most of Christian churches celebrate their rituals in the local language, still some traditional churches keep the older ritual languages, like Latin, Koine Greek, Slavonic, Old Georgian, Armenian, Aramaic, Coptic and many others. The Aramaic used in rituals is not the same Aramaic used in the Bible.  The use of those languages differs from one organization to another.

Very few countries do not have a visible Christian community. Several languages are spoken in Christian communities, however, we can spot the most used by groups and which ones are more important in terms of communications: in the Catholic Church, the centre is located in the Holy See, and they use Italian and Latin to communicate.  But according to different publications, among the believers, the most spoken languages are Spanish and Portuguese.  When we talk about Orthodox Church, Although Koine Greek has a central part in its rituals and traditions, the most used language for rituals is Slavonic.  If we believe in the numbers from https://orthodoxwiki.org/Orthodox_Church#cite_note-2 Russian is the most used language among members and by far.  There are more orthodox believers using Ukrainian or Romanian in their everyday life than Greek.  The Anglican churches use English as Lingua Franca, and Lutherans also use English to communicate among themselves, but the country with the highest No of believers is Germany. Other Christian churches do not lead to significant changes in this linguistic Map, but according to a study published by PeW research, http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/  In a couple of decades, another language will be among the most important languages spoken by Christians in the world: Chinese.  

Islam

Islam uses Classical Arabic as its sacred language.  With Statistics showing a population of more than 1600 million believers, and Arabic being a language spoken by 267 million people, not all of them Muslims, it is clearly that most of the believers in this faith do not speak Arabic. However, Arabic is still the most spoken language in the Muslim World, comparing to the number of speakers of other important languages in the Muslim world like Bengali, Indonesian, Javanese, Urdu, Turkish, Malay and Farsi. In  https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size appear the number of speakers of those language. There are not clear statistics on how many Muslims speak each language. Muslims do not have a lingua Franca, and numbers do not show that Arabic will be that language. Many Muslims communicate to members of other communities using English or French.  Islam is growing in the west, but according to Pew Research, in a couple of decades, the country that will host the biggest Muslim community will be India. What is true is that today, Classical Arabic is the most used language for religious rituals in the whole world.

Judaism

The Sacred language of Judaism is Hebrew. Aramaic is also used in some texts and rituals.  Hebrew is the language of Jewish people and National Language of the State of Israel. There are around 8.2 million speakers of this language, 4.4 million are native speakers. Not all speakers belong to the almost 15 million members of Jewish Community worldwide. In Israel, there are more than a million citizens who are not Jewish but most of them are proficient in Hebrew. English is the most used language and the lingua franca for the members of this community. According to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html More Jewish are living in English speaking countries than in Israel, and in this country, English is the most used language as L2. Another language widely used by Members of this religion is Russian.

Around Jewish communities in the world, some interesting languages with their own literature and traditions were developed throughout the History, like Yiddish, Ladino, Juhuri, Judeo Portuguese, Judeo Persian or Judeo Malayalam. Unfortunately, most of those languages are now endangered.  

   

Zoroastrianism

The sacred Language in this very ancient religion is Avestan, the language of the Avesta, the sacred Book, and most of prayers are recited in this language. The rest of religious texts and commentaries are in Middle Persian, written in Pahlevi and Pazand Script. After the fall of Sassanian Empire, part of this community emigrated and settled in India.  They are known as Parsees, and they speak mostly Gujarati. Those who remained in Iran speak Farsi. They also developed their own dialect called Dari (Not to be confused with Afghan Dari). There are aprox. 8.000 speakers According to http://www.ethnologue.com/language/GBZ , and it is considered a moribund language.  The lingua franca of Zoroastrians today is English.

Buddhism

The languages of the texts are Sanskrit and Pali. There is also a big corpse of texts in Tibetan available for followers of this branch of the religion. It is still unclear in which language taught Buddha.  According to Pew research, more than 46% of Buddhists live in China, but they are still minority there.  Countries that have majority of Buddhist population are Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bhutan, Laos, Mongolia and Taiwan. Buddhism has a great influence in Countries like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore. One of the problems when counting the Number of Buddhists in those countries is that Buddhists usually follow another religion at the same time, and most of researches do not offer this option.  But we have a clear idea of which languages we can expect to hear speaking among members of this community. Chinese, Japanese and Thai are the most used languages. English is also widely used in lectures and to translate texts.

Taoism

Taoism or Daoism, is in essence, a Chinese religion and most of it believers are Chinese living in China and Taiwan. Its ancient texts are written mainly in Classical Chinese. Taoism has been spreading to other parts of the world, especially to Eastern Asia and America.  There are translations available in English of most of its texts and teachings.

Hinduism

 The Sacred Language of this religion is Sanskrit. This is the language of the rituals and sacred texts. Some texts are also in Tamil. Most of the followers of this religion live in India and Nepal. Data from https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size  and other pages about demography in India, can lead us to conclude that the most spoken languages in this community are Hindi and English. There are other languages also popular like Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi.

My Conclusions:

There are statistics and studies about how many people speak each language and aprox how many people follow each religion. However, relate religions, with the languages that their followers speak is still something that needs a lot of research. This Lack of information about relations between spoken language and faith may lead to more misunderstanding.  There are already communities affected by this.  For this Article, I read different articles in different languages. Most of scholars concentrate on the ritual and sacred books when they link religion with languages. In the web page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_language there is general information about the languages used in each tradition, it is presented in a simple way and if someone wants to go more in deep, there are more scholarly works available.