Language, Religion and Cosmopolitanism: Language Use in the Catholic Church in Yaounde, Cameroon  

Oleh:

Kouega, Jean-Paul

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Multilingualism (Full Text) vol. 5 no. 2 (2008), page 140-153.
Topik: language in religion; language policy; language use; multilingualism; Catholic Church
Fulltext: 05_02_Kouega.pdf (129.17KB)

Isi artikel

This paper presents the beginning of an approach to the study of language use and religion, a sub-area of language and religion that has been little explored. Essential features of the approach include segmenting a religious service into its constituent parts and checking what language is used in what part and for what purpose. The proposed framework has been applied to the Catholic mass service in a cosmopolitan set-up and it will be modified as more empirical evidence is gathered. Criticisms are welcome, as they will contribute to refining the framework if it resists empirical tests. The corpus examined consisted of 60 mass services offered in 20 of the 65 parishes of Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon. The analysis showed that while French and English
the country’s joint official languages
and Beti and Bassa
two minority languages spoken in the Centre province of Cameroon1
are liturgical languages i.e. used for the Gospel, sermons etc, the other minority languages spoken by the inhabitants of the capital city are used mainly for singing and occasionally for epistle reading. Interestingly, the choice of these minority languages is determined by various nonsociolinguistic factors including the degree of their speakers’ involvement in church issues.

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