Abstract
This chapter explores the influence of religion and hegemony on language by concentrating on English, German and the Romance languages widely spoken in Europe and the Americas.
Bible translations have helped to keep alive native languages. German and English are associated with the Reformation and have thus been highly influenced by the Bible. In turn, Roman languages are associated with the status quo of the Roman Empire, i.e. Roman Church-State. The Roman Church-State condemned—and sought to impede—any effort to bring the Holy Scriptures within reach of common people, in order to prevent what happened in Germany and England. Thus, the influence of the Bible on Latin languages has been limited.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (King James Bible, 1769, John, 1:1–3).
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF
Keywords
The importance of studying language in order to understand social phenomena is not new. The last decades have witnessed a growing academic interest in the study of language and of discourse analysis in the social sciences (Heracleous, 2006). Consequently, “…language (and language use) is increasingly being understood as the most important phenomenon, accessible for empirical investigation, in social and organizational research” (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000, p. 1126).
In this sense, studying language in practice has played an important role since ancient times. The biblical citation at the beginning of this section, first written thousands of years ago, directly links language to the Creation and the divine. This notion is currently recognised in systemic approaches to language, where “language is action” and “creates realities” (Foucault, 1972; Echavarria, 2006, pp. 34–36).
Austin (1962) also challenged the traditional notion of “to say something is just to state something” and instead posited that “to say something…is to do something” (p. 12). Likewise, “language is not a medium for representing the world, but for intervening in it” (Argyris et al. as cited in Romme, 2003, p. 563). These notions have led to recognising the prominent role of language as a means of shaping institutions and society. Furthermore, ample theoretical and empirical evidence points to language as a suitable proxy for culture (Stulz & Williamson, 2003; Grinblatt & Keloharju, 2001; Ronen & Shenkar, 1985; Hofstede, 1980 as cited in Volonté, 2015, p. 83). Language, religion, and legal origins are all highly correlated and associated with particular institutional performances (Chakrabarti et al., 2008; Volonté, 2015; Mazar, 2008).
1 The Role of the Bible in Shaping Language and Societies
The Bible has been translated into numerous vernacular languages:
1.1 German
Several studies have discussed the profound influence of the Reformation on the spread and standardisation of the German language through Luther’s translation of the Bible (Volz & Greenslide, 1963; Besch, 1999; Greenslade, 1963). It was mainly through the vernacular translation of the Bible that people learned to read and that human capital was enhanced. This process has resulted in higher literacy rates among Protestants to this day (Becker & Woessmann, 2009). Consequently, the language of Luther’s translation became more than part of German national heritage, first for Protestants, and later penetrating every German-speaking home (Ritter, 1963).
1.2 English
Similarly to German, the English language had almost no prestige before the Protestant Reformation. Later, different dialects and different Bible translations challenging the unity of the English kingdom motivated King James to commission a scholarly and reputable translation of the Scriptures. The Authorised (King James) Version (KJV) has served ever since as a unifier and dominant cultural conditioner in English-speaking thought, language, and literature (Lewis, 1969; McGrath, 2001; Daniell, 2003).
1.3 Other Native Languages
Bible translations have helped to keep alive native languages otherwise threatened with extinction across the world (Moor & Voinov, 2015).
1.4 Latin, Roman Empire, and Roman Catholicism
The Roman Empire spread Latin. Celtic speakers, for example, adopted the Latin imperial language and thus gave birth to French (Moor & Voinov, 2015). Moreover, Latin never died but evolved into Roman languages descending from Vulgar Latin (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, Catalan, Romansh) (Wright, 1988). Furthermore, the Roman Church-State inherited Latin as its official language. However, the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible only became official for Roman Catholicism at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which was prompted by the Protestant Reformation. The Latin translation was intended only for the clergy and theologians (Lampe, 1969).
Consequently, the Roman Church-State condemned—and sought to impede—any effort to bring the Holy Scriptures within reach of common people, in order to prevent what happened in Germany and England. The fate suffered by those Reformers who translated the Bible into Spanish (Reina and Valera) was a common one: They were persecuted and exiled from Spain (Hauben, 1967).
To uphold the Catholic Church-State, the governments of several Latin American countries banned Protestant services and the printing of the Bible in Spanish until the last century (Gill, 1998). Thus, the influence of the Bible on Latin languages has been limited. Figure 10.1 illustrates one example: The content of the Roman Catholic Catechism Decalogue in “Catholic” languages (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese) differs from that in “Protestant” languages (e.g. English and German). In “Protestant languages” the Ten Commandments in the Catholic Catechism resemble more the Bible’s wording (King James Bible, 1769, Exodus 20, 1–17) than in “Catholic languages” (Sect. 10.4.1.1).
Empirical Expectation
-
11).
I expect German and English-speaking countries to be more competitive/transparent than those speaking Romanlanguages. German and English are associated with the Reformation, whereas Romanlanguagesare associated with the status quo of the Roman Empire, i.e. Roman Church-State.
References
Alvesson, M., & Karreman, D. (2000). Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 53(9), 1125–1149.
Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press.
Becker, S., & Woessmann, L. (2009). Was Weber wrong? A human capital theory of protestant economic history. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(2), 531–596.
Besch, W. (1999). Die Rolle Luthers in der deutschen Sprachgeschichte. Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Chakrabarti, R., Gupta-Mukherjee, S., & Jayaraman, N. (2008). Mars–Venus marriages: Culture and cross-border M&A. Journal of International Business Studies, 40(2), 216–236.
Daniell, D. (2003). The Bible in English. Yale University Press.
Echavarria, R. (2006). Ontología del lenguaje. Comunicaciones Noreste Ltda.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. Routledge.
Gill, A. (1998). Rendering unto Caesar: the Catholic Church and the state in Latin America. Chicago University Press.
Greenslade, S. (1963). The Cambridge history of the Bible: The West from the reformation to the present day. Cambridge University Press.
Grinblatt, M., & Keloharju, M. (2001). How distance, language and culture influence stockholdings and trades. Journal of Finance, 56(3), 1053–1073.
Hauben, P. (1967). Three Spanish Heretics and the reformation. Librairie Droz.
Heracleous, L. (2006). Discourse, interpretation, organization. Cambridge University Press.
King James Bible. (1769). The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769. Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Lampe, G. (1969). The Cambridge history of the Bible (Vol. 2). Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, C. (1969). The literary impact of the authorised version. In W. Hooper (Ed.), Selected literary essays. Cambridge University Press.
Mazar, H. (2008). An analysis of regulatory frameworks for wireless communications, societal concerns and risk: the case of radio frequency (RF) allocation and licensing. PhD thesis, Middlesex University.
McGrath, A. (2001). In the beginning: The story of the King James Bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture. Hodder & Stoughton.
Moor, M., & Voinov, V. (2015). Language vitality through Bible translation (Berkeley insights in linguistics and semiotics) (Vol. 9, 5th ed.). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic.
Ritter, G. (1963). Luther: His life and work. Harper and Row Publishers.
Romme, A. (2003). Difference: Organization design. Organization Science, 14(5), 558–573.
Ronen, S., & Shenkar, O. (1985). Clustering countries on attitudinal dimensions: A review and synthesis. Academy of Management Review, 10(3), 435–454.
Stulz, R. M., & Williamson, R. (2003). Culture, openness, and finance. Journal of Financial Economics, 70(3), 313–349.
Volonté, C. (2015). Culture and corporate governance: The influence of language and religion in Switzerland. Management International Review, 55, 77–118.
Volz, H., & Greenslide, S. e. (1963). The Cambridge history of the Bible (Vol. 3). Cambridge University Press.
Wright, R. (1988). Did Latin die? Omnibus (15), 27–29.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
García Portilla, J. (2022). Language and Religion. In: “Ye Shall Know Them by Their Fruits”. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78498-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78498-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78497-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78498-0
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)