Language, Religion and Cosmopolitanism: Language Use in the Catholic Church in Yaounde, Cameroon

Abstract

This paper presents the beginning of an approach to the study of language use and religion, a sub-area of language and religion that has been little explored. Essential features of the approach include segmenting a religious service into its constituent parts and checking what language is used in what part and for what purpose. The proposed framework has been applied to the Catholic mass service in a cosmopolitan set-up and it will be modified as more empirical evidence is gathered. Criticisms are welcome, as they will contribute to refining the framework if it resists empirical tests. The corpus examined consisted of 60 mass services offered in 20 of the 65 parishes of Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon. The analysis showed that while French and English – the country's joint official languages – and Beti and Bassa – two minority languages spoken in the Centre province of Cameroon1 – are liturgical languages i.e. used for the Gospel, sermons etc., the other minority languages spoken by the inhabitants of the capital city are used mainly for singing and occasionally for epistle reading. Interestingly, the choice of these minority languages is determined by various non-sociolinguistic factors including the degree of their speakers’ involvement in church issues.