yawiki.org entry for Sacred language

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A sacred language (or liturgical language) is a language, frequently a dead language, that is cultivated for religious reasons by people who speak another language in their daily life.
The traditions involved in religious ritual and liturgy quite frequently provide a place where archaic forms of language occur. One of the last places the obsolescent English pronoun thou remains in frequent use is in religious liturgy; wherever the Authorised Version of the Bible is read, or older versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer are in use.

The use of a sacred language represents a further development of this practice. Here, language has changed so far from the language of the sacred texts that the language of the old liturgy is no longer comprehensible without special training. Missionary and pilgrim faiths may then spread the old language to populations which never spoke it, and to whom it is yet another foreign language. Once a language becomes associated with religious worship, its believers often ascribe virtues to the language of worship that they would not give to their native tongues. The sacred language is typically vested with a solemnity and dignity that speech in the vernacular lacks. The enterprise of training clergy to use and understand the sacred language becomes an important cultural investment. Their use of the tongue gives them access to a body of knowledge that untrained lay people cannot access.

A number of languages have been used as sacred languages. They include:

Ecclesiastical Latin is used in Catholicism, a tradition beginning with Saint Jerome's Vulgate, dethroning Greek as the Sacred Language. It remains the universal standard language of the Church, but its use has faded considerably since the 1960s and 1970s, replaced by the vernacular of respective locales. Use of Latin is still greatly encouraged, and Papal ceremonies make use of it very heavily. Of course, Eastern Catholic Churches in union with Rome are not put under the same obligations of having Latin as the primary language.

Neo-Aramaic, used as a liturgical language by Assyrian Christians who belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. Members of the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Syriac Catholic Church also speak in Neo-Aramaic.

Classical Arabic, for Muslims the only true language of the Qur'an; it differs markedly from the various forms of contemporary spoken Arabic.

Avestan, the language of the oldest portions 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.

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 Christians (in both the Orthodox Tewahedo and the Catholic churches).

An old variant of German is used in Amish communities for Bible readings and sermons.

Hebrew, the language of the Torah used in the liturgy of Judaism.

Koine Greek, which plays a similar role in Greek Christianity. It differs markedly from Modern Greek, but remains half-comprehensible for Modern Greek speakers.

Ladino, as a form of Judeo-Spanish closer to the original Hebrew syntax, was reserved for Bible translations by Sephardis.

Latin, for Western Europeans perhaps the sacred language par excellence.

Mandaic, an Aramaic language, in Mandaeanism

Various Native American languages are cultivated for religious and ceremonial purposes by Native Americans who no longer use them in daily life.

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, a learned but still living tongue, the tongue of the Vedas and other sacred texts of Hinduism as well as the original language of Mahayana Buddhism and 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.

Old Tibetan, known as Chhokey in Bhutan, the sacred language of Tibetan Buddhism

Sumerian, cultivated long after its extinction in Assyria and Babylon.

Yoruba, the language of the Yoruba people, brought to the New World by African slaves, and preserved in Santería, Candomblé, and other transplanted African religions.

    Sacred language
        Judaism
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Judaism
The Holy Tongue, or as it is written in Hebrew: לשון הקודש (pronounced Lashon Ha-kodesh), is a phrase used to refer to the Biblical Hebrew language. The expression is first attested in a fragmentary work preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls and later occurs in Rabbinic literature.

From the story of the Tower of Babel, the Jews learn that God punished mankind by breaking his language into seventy different languages so as-to prevent man from building the tower any further. The reason why it is called the Holy Tongue is because every word in the language was named with divine precision. The Hebrew language started from the Holy Tongue, ancient Hebrew as it appears in the Torah, and evolved into what we call Hebrew today or Modern Hebrew.

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