RELIGIOUS CHANNELS OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE: CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH

Abstract

This article examines religious channels of linguistic change that have shaped the development of English, focusing on Christianity and Islam as historically significant vectors of lexical, semantic, orthographic, and discursive innovation. Christianity provided early and sustained inputs via Latin- and Greek-mediated church vocabulary, biblical translation traditions, and sermonizing genres that standardized formulaic expressions and idioms. Islam, by way of Arabic and Persian and via mediating languages (e.g., French, Italian, Spanish), contributed technical, cultural, and religious lexicon across medieval trade, early modern scholarship, and contemporary media and migration, with growing visibility in late modern English. Synthesizing historical linguistics, contact linguistics, and translation studies, the paper proposes a comparative, corpus-informed framework to track diffusion pathways (missionary education, scripture translation, scholarly exchange, media circulation) and linguistic outcomes (borrowings, calques, semantic shifts, register formation). Pilot, illustrative corpus trends and typologies are presented to show how religious institutions and practices have served as durable sociocultural infrastructures for linguistic change. The article argues that religious channels remain productive in World Englishes through transliteration conventions, policy debates, and interfaith discourse, and concludes with implications for diachronic corpora design, lexicography, and pedagogy.