ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a transglossic approach to explore the ordinariness of English among Muslim communities in South and Central Asia. It, thereby, maintains that studying English as an ordinary part of these communities’ repertoires is contingent upon an approach to religion as situated, discursive, and interactive. This approach to religion is key to avoiding a paradoxical treatment of religion and language that critically examines the meaning of language without interrogating religion in the same manner. To this end, the chapter uses examples from ethnographic face-to-face and online fieldwork among Muslim communities in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Bangladesh to explore and rethink the relationship between religion and language. The chapter concludes that religion is co-constructed and emergent in, across, and through English and other languages and semiotic resources. English seems to be rendered ordinary as it is employed and invoked to perform religious identity in interlocutors’ everyday language practices. English is, thereby, used to engage in processes of positioning, and it emerges as a resource that is simultaneously translocal and polyvocal, while also locally meaningful in its situated practices.
