Exploring Religious Beliefs and Practices from around the World

Exploring Religious Beliefs and Practices from around the World sets out to identify the languages that the Catholic Church uses for its religious rites in the highly multilingual setting of the Southwest Region of Cameroon on the one hand, and to work out the reasons that determine the choice of these languages out of the many available codes on the other hand. The data were collected in the main church of the following eight localities: Bangem, Buea, Kumba, Limbe, Mamfe, Mundemba, Tiko and Tombel. Next, the authors discuss how Jerusalem has served as a magnet for devout pilgrims who wished to visit the New Testament sites. This pilgrim movement required the development of support systems to accommodate these travellers and their needs. In the 12th century, these support structures translated into the various Crusader Monastic Orders that had separate establishments in Jerusalem and eventually in Acre after the Christian forces were expelled from the city by Salah al-Din in 1187. Continuing, a paper is included which investigates language practice by Moslem faithfuls in multilingual settings of Northern Cameroon. It focuses on the Friday prayer, the most important of all the statutory prayers. The data were collected through participant observation, a nineteen-item questionnaire (administered in the main three towns of this half of the country, namely Maroua, Garoua and Ngaoundere), library and internet search and personal communication with worshipers. Lastly, this book aims to decipher how participants manage multilingualism in religious settings, through the functional structural framework (Kouega, 2008) which consists of breaking up a church service into its constituent parts and sorting out language use for each part. The data were collected in eight Protestant churches through participant observation and a questionnaire. The analysis of the data revealed that multilingualism is addressed in socio-religious multilingual settings through eight main communication strategies, namely code-switching, borrowing, random alternation, chorus recitation, summarizing, paraphrasing, repetition, and translation.