Jehovah's Witnesses, endangered languages, and the globalized textual community

•The practices of Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide are centralized and standardized.•I propose the globalized textual community to understand JW practice.•One key element of this community is the discourse of the pure language.•This notion of community has implications for indigenous language speakers.

This article explores Jehovah's Witnesses' use of Oaxaca Chontal, an endangered language spoken in Mexico. The Witness religion is highly centralized and standardized: Witnesses obeyed instructions to use Chontal because these instructions bore the authority of the Watch Tower Society institution. This article proposes the concept of the globalizing textual community, which synthesizes understandings of community from throughout social science literature, in order to explain how religious identity can supersede national, ethnic, and linguistic identities. A central mechanism of this community is the discourse of the “pure language,” which renders language choice irrelevant even as it provides a warrant for extensive translation.