“Glory and Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ”: Linguo-Cultural Analysis of Prayers among Baptist Serbs in Romania

Abstract

In this paper, our case study is the Serbian Baptist community in the Danube Gorge in Romania, from the settlements Radimna, Pojejena, Moldova Veche, Divici and Liubcova. The objective of the ethnographic field research was to collect data on non-Orthodox Serbs living outside the borders of their home country and having experienced conversion to one of the Evangelical communities during the second half of the twentieth century. One of the most significant elements of the narrative of the Serbian Baptists is the place of prayer in their daily life. This paper is analysing prayer in the wider context and more specifically using linguo-cultural analyses it provides several examples of Baptist prayer narrative, its main characteristics and patterns. The analyses focus on the question how the religious identity of Baptists can be defined or strengthened through prayer. From the aspect of linguistics and communicology, prayer is a speech act having a specific internal and external structure: it contains the beginning, duration and finalization, including the abundance of accompanying nonverbal acts. Based on the collected ethnographic data, we analyse several fragments of prayers among the Baptist Serbs which illustrate the modalities of communication through prayer. Keywords: Baptists, Serbian minority in Romania, prayers, Evangelicals, language and religion.