Aim:We investigate how children in the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu/Saiva faith community in London learn and use Sanskrit alongside Tamil and/or English and other multimodal and embodied resources to communicate with the Divine.Methodology:The data were collected as part of a 3-year multi-sited collaborative team ethnography documenting how migrant children become literate in faith settings.Data and analysis:The data consist of participant observations across religious education classes, the Temple, and the home, and interviews with the key participant child, Chantia, her brother and the Chief priest at the Temple. The analysis focuses on instances in the data where sacred language learning and performance are thematised. In addition, we analyse a digital video recording of Chantia’s daily morning prayers using transvisuals.Findings:Learning Sanskrit consists of integrating a limited set of Sanskrit religious texts and practices, such as key religious concepts, mantras, and poetic verses in children’s evolving religious repertoire and is embedded in children’s everyday religious socialisation across contexts. Chantia unites and syncretises a range of conventionalised semiotic resources, including religious texts in Sanskrit to communicate with the Divine and personalise her act of worship.Conclusions:Children’s religious repertoires are learned, deployed, adapted, and expanded differently depending on the affordances of the socio-cultural context. Chantia’s meaning-making process is much more complex than the rigid categorisation of the different modal resources she deploys, forming an integrated system of communication.Originality:Our conceptualisation of Sanskrit sacred language learning is anchored on a multilingual and multimodal perspective that does not privilege Sanskrit over other (sacred) languages nor linguistic over non-linguistic resources.Significance:Our paper extends current critique of logocentric perspectives in applied and sociolinguistics to the examination of religious repertoires that are often driven by a communication hierarchy positioning sacred languages at the top and other aspects of communication as secondary.

中文翻译：

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梵文作为神圣语言的学习和表演：伦敦儿童的宗教曲目和融合实践


目的：我们调查伦敦斯里兰卡泰米尔印度教/赛瓦信仰社区的儿童如何学习和使用梵语以及泰米尔语和/或英语以及其他多模式和具体资源来与神沟通。 方法：收集数据是作为为期 3 年的多地点协作团队民族志记录了流动儿童如何在信仰环境中识字。数据和分析：数据包括对宗教教育课程、寺庙和家庭的参与者观察，以及对主要参与者孩子 Chantia 的采访、她的兄弟和圣殿的首席祭司。该分析重点关注数据中以神圣语言学习和表现为主题的实例。此外，我们使用透视法分析了 Chantia 每日晨祷的数字视频记录。研究结果：学习梵文包括整合有限的一组梵文宗教文本和实践，例如儿童不断发展的宗教曲目中的关键宗教概念、咒语和诗歌。并融入儿童日常宗教社会化的各个情境中。 Chantia 统一并融合了一系列传统的符号学资源，包括梵文宗教文本，用于与神沟通并个性化她的崇拜行为。结论：儿童的宗教曲目的学习、部署、适应和扩展取决于社会的承受能力。 -文化背景。 Chantia 的意义构建过程比她部署的不同模态资源的严格分类要复杂得多，形成了一个集成的通信系统。原创性：我们对梵语神圣语言学习的概念化是以多语言和多模式的视角为基础的，这种视角并不使梵语优于其他（神圣）语言，也不使语言优于非语言资源。意义：我们的论文扩展了当前对应用和社会语言学中逻各斯中心观点的批评对宗教曲目的审查通常是由传播等级制度驱动的，将神圣语言置于顶层，而传播的其他方面则处于次要地位。