This volume shares the results of research conducted within and across the complex nexus of language, religion and new technologies. It identifies the dynamic and mobile ways religious practice and language interact online to modify, confirm, transform and consolidate linguistic resources and repertoires. It makes a significant contribution to work in the emerging sub-discipline of the sociology of language and religion and adds to the growing work on digital religion. It also showcases leading and ground-breaking researchers working on online and offline examples of the complex relationships evinced by the study of language and religion. The chapter authors explore a wide range of religions, technologies and languages in order to provide an innovative insight into the overlap between the study of language and religion and language and technology.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Religion is the first ever comprehensive collection of research on religion and language, with over 35 authors from 15 countries, presenting a range of linguistic and discourse analytic research on religion and belief in different discourse contexts. The contributions show the importance of studying language and religion and for bringing together work in this area across sub-disciplines, languages, cultures, and geographical boundaries. The Handbook focuses on three major topics: Religious and Sacred Language, Institutional Discourse, and Religious Identity and Community. Scholars from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds investigate these topics using a range of linguistic perspectives including Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, and Conversation Analysis. The data analysed in these chapters come from a variety of religious backgrounds and national contexts. Linguistic data from all the major world religions are included, with sacred texts, conversational data, and institutional texts included for analysis. The Handbook is intended to be useful for readers from different subdisciplines within linguistics, but also to researchers working in other disciplines including philosophy, theology, and sociology. Each chapter gives both a template for research approaches and suggestions for future research and will inspire readers at every stage of their career.

What is the role of performance in faith practices? How is performance understood in and across a range of faith settings? How are performance and faith conceptualised through different academic disciplines? This collection of essays addresses these questions, and others, as it explores the complex relationship present in the nexus between faith and performance. A naturally inter-disciplinary work, this book contains contributions from a diverse group of scholars representing a wide range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives. As sociolinguists explore how language performance shapes and is shaped by faith, social anthropologists and psychologists examine how identity performance is crucial in negotiating faith identities, and scholars from theatre and performance studies engage with ways material settings are performatively transfigured to create sacred spaces (to mention but a few approaches covered in this book), the reader is taken on a journey of the world’s faiths and their diverse practices.

This volume addresses the question ‘What role does religion play in the maintenance, revival and/or shift, of languages?’ The chapters in this volume explore the complex and dynamic relationship between religion and the maintenance, revival and/or shift of languages in different multilingual multicultural contexts, under diverse sociopolitical conditions, at different points in time. The 12 chapters cover data from Algeria, India, Israel, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, UK, USA and Uganda and discuss the impact of context, ideology, identity and education on the following religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, and some religions closely associated with China such as Confucianism and Taoism, and their respective languages and varieties of language in these regions. The languages discussed by the writers in this volume include Arabic, English, Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Punjabi, Pali, Sanskrit, Tamazight and Yoruba.

The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive overview of this growing body of research, combining ethnographic approaches with close attention to language use. This handbook illustrates the richness and potential of linguistic ethnography to provide detailed understandings of situated patterns of language use while connecting these patterns clearly to broader social structures. Including a general introduction to linguistic ethnography and 25 state-of-the-art chapters from expert international scholars, the handbook is divided into three sections. Chapters cover historical, empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions to the field, and new approaches and developments. This handbook is key reading for those studying linguistic ethnography, qualitative research methods, sociolinguistics and educational linguistics within English Language, Applied Linguistics, Education and Anthropology.

People have always depended on the mass media for information and entertainment. With mobile devices and easy access to the internet, people are now in constant connection with an ever growing source of information and entertainment and they contribute their own content to those sources through social media. As their media usage shifts towards digital media with their immediacy, interactivity, and intrusiveness, the way media affects people has fundamentally changed. Digital Media Effects focuses on those changes in media effects. While the author acknowledges the findings from the very large literature of effects from exposure to traditional media. Expanding from traditional media effects studies, this book focuses attention on the kinds of effects that have arisen in the new digital age.

Preaching, a practice composed of and accompanied by a myriad of different activities, is an essential element of Muslim religious life both within and beyond mosques. As such, Islamic preaching is a common means of religious promulgation and knowledge transfer, of pastoral guidance and uplift, but also of communication between believers, and as a source of negotiating religious normativity, power relations, and societal topics. Given the centrality of preaching in Muslims' religious life, this collective volume presents contributions on various aspects of performance, text, space, and materiality of Islamic preaching in history and present. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary framework captures Islamic preaching as it unfolds in its social setting. The volume aims at representing the inner-Islamic diversity by depicting the practice of preaching as it came about in different times and geographical locations, shedding light onto Friday gatherings and sermons (ḫutba), and other forms of preaching (e. g. waʿẓ), be it during Ramadan, at religious feasts and commemorations, or on personal occasions such as weddings and funerals. Therefore, each chapter offers a different insight into the interwoven character of sermons' contents, the preacher him/herself, and the audience by emphasising the role of their bodily performance, of the temporality and spatiality of preaching, and of the objects and items involved.