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In:Identity Perspectives from Peripheries
Edited by Yoshiko Matsumoto and Jan-Ola Östman
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 352] 2025
► pp. 66–91

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Chapter 4
Dimensions of periphery

Identity work in a multilingual German-African church service

ORCiD logo with link | University of Hamburg
Published online: 13 June 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.352.04boc
Abstract
This chapter is based on a study of multilingual, intercultural, and interactional data in the religious domain (cf. Bock 2023), a field of research that has mostly been neglected by pragmatics and sociolinguistics and makes a case for the inclusion of religious contexts in linguistic analyses. The research site in this study is a rare phenomenon and thus itself peripheral to the German religious landscape: A joint and regular church service of a German church and an African migrant church. Focusing on the identity features of ethnicity, religion, and language and their relation to the concept of periphery/core, it analyses the joint church service in two regards: First, it takes a broader view of the service and its congregation and discusses whether and why those identity features might lead to the perception of a person’s or group’s (more) central or (more) peripheral social position. Second, it looks at interactional data from the service’s dialogic sermons and analyzes whether and how some of those features are used in the pastors’ identity work. The analyses show that the joint service tries to create a space for everyone to feel equally acknowledged and central to it by blending elements from both religious traditions. The service’s structural, content-related, and linguistic design entails a treatment of the possibly exclusionary identity features that facilitates intercultural exchange and the creation of a sense of community.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Language, religion, and identity in linguistics
  • 2.Relations of identity and periphery/core
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Dimensions of periphery–core in the joint service
    • 4.1Ethnicity
    • 4.2Religion
    • 4.3Language ideologies
  • 5.Examples of explicit/implicit identity work in the joint service
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (69)
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