A Sociolinguistic View of Cultural Influences in Conversations about Religion

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F25%3ALYCV6UPW" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/25:LYCV6UPW - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/asj/vol9/iss1/7" target="_blank" >https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/asj/vol9/iss1/7</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

—

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

A Sociolinguistic View of Cultural Influences in Conversations about Religion

Original language description

Much research has been done to examine how miscommunications occur across cultures, and how understanding cultural contexts can help us be more successful in linguistic endeavors. This paper addresses intercultural communication issues in religious conversations among American English speakers and Japanese speakers by examining how the different sociocultural meanings attached to individual lexical items associated with religious topics (e.g., god and prayer) differ between English and Japanese. This is a qualitative study using data from publicly available corpora of Japanese and English as well as sociolinguistic interviews. I will not present the analysis of the interviews here: however, I consulted the interviews to confirm the data from the corpora and will briefly mention those. The data includes which collocations these two words appear within certain grammatical structures in both English and Japanese as well as what social contexts they appear in. There are some similarities across these two different linguistic and cultural contexts, however, noting the differences can help us know what cultural assumptions may underlie discussions about religion and how these impact the development of religious understandings. This matters because religious topics are highly sensitive to context—that is, to speakers' pre-existing assumptions about religion, their worldviews, and the beliefs they were raised up in. From there, we can better learn how to adapt in order to communicate and interact with others with more cultural awareness. I will address the potential miscommunications that might occur due to different understandings of ostensibly similar lexical meanings in the social context of volunteer missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aiming to communicate with and seek Japanese converts. While some limitations to this study include limited interview participants and analysis of only two lexical items in the corpus study, this research still serves as a valuable starting point for further studies.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

—

Continuities

—

Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

BYU Asian Studies Journal

ISSN

2572-4479

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

9

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

12

Pages from-to

1-12

UT code for WoS article

—

EID of the result in the Scopus database

—