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 Á the country's joint official languages Á and Beti and Bassa Á two minority languages spoken in the Centre province of Cameroon 1 Á 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 nonsociolinguistic factors including the degree of their speakers' involvement in church issues.
IntroductionThis paper describes language use and religion in a multilingual setting, with the aim of establishing the connections that are made in specific congregations between language use and religious practices. The congregation chosen for the study is the Catholic Church in Yaounde, the capital city of Cameroon, a cosmopolitan city where various world religions (see a short list in Kouega, 2007: 46) and religious practices coexist peacefully, with the Catholic faith having the greatest number of followers. 2 Several languages exist in the country (the Ethnologue identified 286 in 2005) but only a limited number are used by missionaries. The present work dwells on language use in one city Á Yaounde Á and in one congregation Á the Catholic Mission; it first gives background information on the Catholic Mission in Cameroon, then the research methodology is discussed and finally the data collected are analysed.
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