Sacred Language - Sacred Languages By Religion

Sacred Languages By Religion

• Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an; it differs from the various forms of contemporary spoken Arabic in lexical and grammatical areas.
• Aramaic, the mother tongue of Jesus and his Disciples. Used by the earliest Christians, the Nazarenes, together with Hebrew for writing the Gospel. Jesus' native western accent survives today in the form of Western Neo-Aramaic in a few remote villages. Aramaic, alongside Hebrew was the language of Post Babylonian Judaism, employed in the Talmud. It also appears in the later books of the Hebrew Bible. It is still used in liturgy today by conservative sects of Judaism, noticeably the Temani.
• Avestan, the language of the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism.
• Classical Chinese, the language of older Chinese literature and the Confucian, Taoist, and in East Asia also of the Mahayana Buddhist sacred texts, which also differs markedly from contemporary spoken Mandarin.
• Coptic, a form of ancient Egyptian, is used by the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church.
• Damin, an initiation language of the Lardil in Australia
• Early Modern Dutch is the language of the Statenvertaling, still in use among (ultra-)orthodox Calvinist denominations in the Netherlands.
• Early Modern English is used in some parts of the Anglican Communion and by the Continuing Anglican movement, as well as by a variety of English-speaking Protestant denominations.
• Eskayan in the Philippines
• Etruscan, cultivated for religious and magical purposes in the Roman Empire.
• Ge'ez, the predecessor of many Ethiopian Semitic languages (e.g. Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre) used as a liturgical language by Ethiopian Jews and by Ethiopian Christians (in both the Orthodox Tewahedo and the Catholic churches).
• Early New High German is used in Amish communities for Bible readings and sermons.
• Gothic, sole East Germanic language which is attested by significant texts, usually considered to have been preserved for the Arian churches, while the Goths themselves spoke vulgar Latin dialects of their areas.
• Koine Greek, the language of early Pauline Christianity and all of its New Testament books. It is today the liturgical language of Greek Christianity. It differs markedly from Modern Greek, but still remains comprehensible for Modern Greek speakers.
• Biblical Hebrew - the languages in which the Hebrew Bible Tanakh/Miqra has been written over time; these differ from today's spoken Hebrew in lexical and grammatical areas. Its closest living descendant is the Temani (Yemenite Hebrew).
• Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language, spoken by Jamaican Maroons, the descendants of runaway slaves in the mountains of Jamaica, during their "Kromanti Play," a ceremony in which the participants are said to be possessed by their ancestors and to speak as their ancestors did centuries ago.
• Kallawaya, a secret medicinal language used in the Andes
• Kannada is the language of Vachana sahitya, which is a literature of Lingayatism. Some literature of this religion is also in Telugu and Sanskrit.
• Korean is the language preferred by the Unification Church. Church founder Sun Myung Moon has instructed all Unification Church members to learn Korean because "Korean is the language closest to God's Heart, and the future world language will be Korean".
• Ecclesiastical Latin is the liturgical language of the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church. It is also the official language of the Holy See.
• Old Latin was used in various prayers in Roman paganism, such as the Carmen Arvale, until its very end. These texts were unintelligible to classical Latin speakers and remain somewhat obscure to scholars even today.
• Mandaic, an Aramaic language, in Mandaeanism
• Historian Robert Beverley, Jr., in his History and Present State of Virginia (1705), wrote that the "priests and conjurers" of the Virginia Indian tribes "perform their adorations and conjurations" in the Occaneechi language, much "as the Catholics of all nations do their Mass in the Latin." He also stated the language was widely used as a lingua franca "understood by the chief men of many nations, as Latin is in many parts of Europe" — even though, as he says, the Occaneechis "have been but a small nation, ever since those parts were known to the English." Scholars believe that the Occaneechi spoke a Siouan dialect similar to Tutelo.
• Palaic and Luwian, cultivated as a religious language by the Hittites.
• Pali, the original language of Theravada Buddhism.
• Some Portuguese and Latin prayers are retained by the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) of Japan, who recite it without understanding the language.
• Classical Punjabi is the language of the holy scripture of Sikhism. It is different from the various dialects of Punjabi that exists today.
• Sanskrit, the tongue of the Vedas and other sacred texts of Hinduism as well as the original language of Mahayana Buddhism and a language of Jainism.
• Old Church Slavonic, which was the liturgical language of the Slavic Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Romanian Orthodox Church
• Church Slavonic is the current liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church, Orthodox Church of Serbia, Orthodox Church of Bulgaria and the Macedonian Orthodox Church and certain Byzantine (Ruthenian) Eastern Catholic churches.
• Sumerian, cultivated and preserved in Assyria and Babylon long after its extinction as an everyday language.
• Syriac, a type of Aramaic, is used as a liturgical language by Syriac Christians who belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church, Assyrian Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox Church, Syriac Catholic Church, and Maronite Church.
• Tamil is the language of the Shaiva (Devaram) and Vaishnava (Divya Prabhandham) scriptures. It is an alienable part of temple ritual in Tamil Nadu and other South Indian temples especially during the time of vaikunta ekadasi in vaishnava .
• Classical Tibetan, known as Chhokey in Bhutan, the sacred language of Tibetan Buddhism
• Various Native American languages are cultivated for religious and ceremonial purposes by Native Americans who no longer use them in daily life.
• Yoruba (known as Lucumi in Cuba), the language of the Yoruba people, brought to the New World by African slaves, and preserved in Santería, Candomblé, and other transplanted African religions.