Communities of Code-Switching Connoisseurs

Abstract

Code-switching is a universal phenomenon of community formation. Religious speech switches between different registers and codes, expanding its possibilities. In South Asia, the pleasure of including different codes and languages is, at the same time, a characteristic of poetic messages, of popular culture and linguistic systems. This paper considers the code-switching in Islamic sermons in contemporary Bangladesh (waz mahfils), which are characterized by a stress on oral performance and communal experience. On the basis of a theoretical introduction into the terminology of code-switching and its rhetorical and poetic expansion, different levels of code-switching in the sermons are analyzed. These range from switches between individual words (mostly from Arabic, Urdu and Bengali), to binding together of several sentences by vocal techniques. From the perspective of code-switching in performance, “formal” translation mechanisms in the sermons, most prominently translations from the Qurʾan, can be evaluated anew. As opposed to a point of view that argumentation and persuasion of the sermons are derived from the Qurʾan as a “scripture”, the inclusion of Qurʾanic quotations into the dynamics of multilingual code-switching and its aesthetic effects emphasizes a poetic form of evidence building on word-play and dramatic script.