In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.John 1:1 (King James ' Bible)Placing the study of religion within the context of language and globalization is a multi -faceted task. The body of relevant work is diverse and comes from a variety of areas. There has been signifi cant work in the fi eld of linguistics and religion, for example on sociolinguistic engagement (on the sociology of language and religion (Omoniyi and Fishman 2006 ). However, it is only in other disciplines that there has been an explicit engagement with globalization. The attention given to this area in the media (Mitchell and Marriage 2003 ), mass communication (Stout and Buddenbaum 1996 ), and sociology (Kurtz 1995 ) is valuable in that it may help to guide and frame future work in linguistics by providing context, organization information, and theoretical schemata. In this chapter I suggest and outline four emerging areas which may be of particular interest to linguists. The importance of linguistics in understanding religion has long been recognized. Crystal ' s early work (1965) can be seen as the starting point for theo -linguistics, a fi eld which did not have a name until more than ten years later. Research in the fi eld covered the stylistics -in its full linguistic sense -of religious language, as well as the social situatedness of language in religion -which included context, register, and genre and extended to debates about language in particular religions, especially with respect to sacred texts, their translation, and altering their register to bring it ' up to date. ' Moreover, dealing with religious texts (spoken and written) will always have to address the status of particular languages in particular religions. Thus the status of Arabic in Islam (on which see Suleiman 2004 andMiller 2008 ), or that of Hebrew in Judaism, are examples of the sacred relationships between language and religion. Not all denominations have singular relationships with language, and this will naturally have an effect
The Handbook of Language and GlobalizationEdited by Nikolas Coupland