ABSTRACT
From a wide-angled view of the language situation in general, we move now to the issue of the special languages and language varieties used in particular religious contexts. Common to many religions is the tradition that rituals must be performed in a particular language, frequently a language clearly distinguished from the language of everyday use. In some cases it is a special variety of the participants’ own language, perhaps an obsolete, forgotten dialect, while in others it is a completely different language which is totally unintelligible to the worshippers. At one end of the spectrum, Greek represents a language widely used and understood to a greater or lesser extent by almost everyone, but given special status in some religious contexts. At the other end of the spectrum, Avestan, the language in which the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism were transmitted, was a variety of Old Iranian known only from those texts and, for most of its history, unintelligible to all but a few experts. Between these two extremes, Hebrew was the spoken language of a small community which withstood the pressures from other stronger language groups and was eventually canonized as the sacred language of the Jews. There is an interesting contrast between Judaism and Christianity here. Jews successfully learnt the language of the country they found themselves in, but preserved their scripture and their liturgy almost entirely in ancient Hebrew. Christians on the other hand, in those first centuries, appear to have made a special effort to communicate their religious teaching, including their sacred texts, in the language of ordinary people. Although Jewish scripture was of crucial importance in Christianity, the original languages in which it was written, Hebrew and Aramaic, never had the same significance for them.
