Religious choice, religious commitment, and linguistic variation: Religion as a factor in language variation: Special issue of Language and Communication

Sociolinguistic consensus suggests that corpora should be sharable to permit broader comparisons across regions and across social groups. Recent studies of available corpora have shown that one variable rarely made available for sociolinguistic comparison is religion (Yaeger-Dror and Cieri, 2013 and Yaeger-Dror, 2014). The present special issue was solicited to demonstrate the importance of religion, and of individual speakers' religious commitment, to the study of sociolinguistic variation. In each study the author finds not only that religion is a meaningful sociolinguistic variable, but that geolinguistic considerations impact on ‘religiolinguistic’ (Hary and Wein, 2013) choices in intricate ways. Commitment to a specific sub-group within a larger religious denomination is relevant, as is a speaker's religious ideology; while addressee design and social network influences often appear indistinguishable from referee design, the two may be more easily distinguished from each other when religious denomination and ideology are factored into a study.