36.3075, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Sacred Languages and the Formation of Religious Terminology: Contact, Borrowing, and Transformation (Germany)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3075. Mon Oct 13 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3075, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Sacred Languages and the Formation of Religious Terminology: Contact, Borrowing, and Transformation (Germany)

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Date: 11-Oct-2025
From: Jan German [jan.german at uj.edu.pl]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: Sacred Languages and the Formation of Religious Terminology: Contact, Borrowing, and Transformation


Workshop at SLE 2026: Sacred Languages and the Formation of Religious
Terminology: Contact, Borrowing, and Transformation

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Oct-2025
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Historical
Linguistics; Lexicography; Semantics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2025

Proposal for a workshop at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea
Convenors:
Jan German (Jagiellonian University, Cracow) jan.german at uj.edu.pl
Dariusz Piwowarczyk (Jagiellonian University, Cracow)
dariusz.piwowarczyk at uj.edu.pl
Religious terminology provides a unique window into processes of
language contact, borrowing, adaptation, and semantic change. Across
time and space, languages regarded as sacred – such as Latin, Greek,
Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, or Hebrew – have exerted a profound and
lasting influence on vernaculars, shaping not only the lexicon of
theology and ritual but also broader conceptual and stylistic
patterns.
This workshop aims to explore the formation, transmission, and
transformation of religious terminology in contexts where sacred and
vernacular languages interact. We invite contributions that address
phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic adaptation of
borrowed terms, as well as the sociolinguistic and cultural mechanisms
that regulate such transfers.
A central question concerns the role of sacredness and religiosity as
sources of linguistic prestige. Sacred languages often function
simultaneously as vehicles of revelation, education, and authority,
thereby establishing hierarchies of linguistic value that guide
borrowing and imitation. The workshop will ask how prestige rooted in
sanctity differs from other forms of prestige (political, economic, or
cultural), and how it affects lexical choices, stylistic norms, and
perceptions of linguistic purity.
Following Bennett’s (2018: 6) distinction between sacred language,
liturgical language, and religious language, we also aim to refine the
analytical vocabulary used in contact studies. This differentiation
allows us to trace how varying degrees of sanctity and
institutionalisation shape the direction, intensity, and nature of
linguistic influence.
Rather than focusing on a single linguistic tradition, the workshop
seeks to bring together a wide range of case studies that illuminate
comparable mechanisms of linguistic sanctification across different
cultural settings. Examples may include the influence of Latin on Old
Polish and other Slavic languages, but also the impact of Arabic on
Berber, Sanskrit on Dravidian, or Greek on early Christian
vernaculars. By integrating such perspectives, the workshop aims to
connect detailed historical and philological analyses with broader
theoretical approaches from historical sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology. This comparative outlook will help identify recurring
patterns in how sacred authority, textual canonicity, and ritual
practice shape the dynamics of contact-induced change and the
formation of religious terminology.
Topics may include
 - Phonological and morphological adaptation of religious terms from
sacred to vernacular languages
 - Semantic shifts and reinterpretations of theological vocabulary
 - Sacredness and prestige as factors shaping linguistic change
 - Institutional and liturgical mechanisms of transmission
 - Translation, calquing, and neologism formation in religious
discourse
 - Comparative studies (e.g. Latin–Slavic, Arabic–Berber,
Sanskrit–Dravidian, etc.)
 - Methodological implications of distinguishing sacred, liturgical,
and religious languages
Please send abstracts of up to 300 words by November 10th to any of
the two convenors. Include your affiliation and e-mail address and add
four to five keywords.
NB: Notification of acceptance/rejection of workshop proposals by the
SLE workshops committee will be by 15 December 2025. In the second
step, abstracts for presentations – also those for workshops – should
be submitted via EasyChair by 15 January 2026, for which
acceptance/rejection will be announced by 31 March 2026.
Selected References:
Bennett, B.P. (2018) Sacred Languages of the World: An Introduction.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Drinka, B. (2011) ‘The sacral stamp of Greek: Periphrastic
constructions in New Testament translations of Latin, Gothic, and Old
Church Slavonic’, in Welo, E. (ed.) Indo-European Syntax and
Pragmatics: Contrastive Approaches. Oslo Studies in Language, 3(3),
pp. 41–73.
Khachaturyan, M. (2017) ‘Christianity, language contact and language
change.’ Texas Linguistic Forum, 60, pp. 1–15.
Kossmann, M.G. (2013) The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber. Leiden
and Boston: Brill.
Leonhardt, J. (2013) Latin: Story of a World Language. Translated by
K. Kronenberg. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
Pollock, S. (2006) The Language of the Gods in the World of Men:
Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India.Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Schieffelin, B.B. (2014) ‘Christianizing language and the
dis-placement of culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.’ Current
Anthropology, 55(S10), pp. S226–S237.
Spolsky, B. (2014) The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Timofeeva, O. (2018) ‘Survival and loss of Old English religious
vocabulary between 1150 and 1350.’ English Language & Linguistics,
22(2), pp. 225–247.
Versteegh, K. (2014) The Arabic Language. 2nd edn. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.



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