ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the phenomenon of sacred languages from the perspective of comparative religion. Sacred languages are ancient, non-vernacular varieties reverently maintained in certain religious traditions, including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and some branches of Christianity and Buddhism. Although they do not have native speakers, sacred languages such as Sanskrit and Hebrew are not dead, akin to Sumerian or Etruscan, but continue to serve as prestigious semiotic resources for a wide range of practices and projects. Two subtypes may be distinguished, involving contrastive ideological and institutional profiles: what may be termed the demotic (e.g., Classical Arabic) is typically viewed as integral to religious identity and therefore acquired widely, though to varying degrees, by adherents; the hieratic subtype (e.g., Ecclesiastical Latin) is seen above all as a necessity for priests who perform rituals on behalf of their communities. In either case, because these ancient languages are not mother tongues used for interpersonal communication, questions about their intelligibility recurrently arise—sometimes culminating in fissiparous debates. The case of Church Slavonic in contemporary Russia illustrates how a thousand-year-old religiolinguistic tradition is maintained in the Orthodox Church (though not without dissension) and, moreover, intersects with developments in culture, politics, art, and technology.
