Religion as a preserver of cultural and linguistic identity

This is a topic which comes up occasionally here--one group converts to a certain religion and because of this, they have a distinctness from society which helps preserves many elements of their culture and most noticebly their language despite the world around them changing immensely. To me it seems fascinating since it's a way to preserve the language and culture of peoples of Antiquity into later times.

The ultimate and most prominent example of this is the Jews, who preserved a culture that emerged out of the Iron Age Near East and formed it into an extremely prominent religion. Their linguistic heritage, the Hebrew language, survived longer than all other Canaanite languages (aside from Punic, which only survived because it retreated to North Africa) AND was successfully resurrected in the modern age. The language the Jews shifted to, the Jewish dialects of Aramaic, were still widely spoken despite the Arab conquests until the foundation of Israel in the 20th century. That's quite the impressive accomplishments of the Jewish people.

As we know, there's others aside from the Jews. Many Christians of the Middle East preserve Aramaic dialects long after they were subsumed by Arabic. The Copts spoke Coptic until the Early Modern age and still use it as a liturgical language, like Hebrew was for centuries--other Coptic traditions preserve pre-Islamic Egypt. The Mandaeans preserve a unique Aramaic-derived language into the modern age, and even a unique Aramaic-derived alphabet. Zoroastrians in modern Iran have their own unique dialect of the Persian language. Karaites and Samaritans, both Jewish-derived, preserve unique languages of their own. The Amish and some Mennonites hold on to a particular German dialect, the Pennsylvania German language. In the future, the Mormons will probably have their own variant of English. Examples clearly abound.

But I bring up the point of preservation again. Is the ability of religious traditions to preserve languages any way overrated? A while back there was a short TL here involving Sumerian speakers who had a unique interpretation of Christianity/Islam (IIRC) in the modern age. That's an extreme example, but slightly more plausibly, is it really a case that if the right people in, say, cultures which spoke Tocharian and Anatolian languages, converted to Christianity or an otherwise unique religion (like a unique/heretical interpretation of a religion), those languages might have survived along with elements of the cultures which spoke them?

By extension, if Europe and the Middle East are fractured in terms of the religious landscape, with no clear lines drawn, would we have many languages of Antiquity surviving, like Continental Celtic languages (Noric, Galatian, etc.), East Germanic languages, all the aforementioned languages (Tocharian, Punic, Anatolian languages like Pisidian, Isaurian, and Cappadocian which likely survived into CE times), unique dialects of Greek (Cyrenaican), unique Iranian languages (Sogdian, Bactrian, etc.), "Paleo-Balkan" languages, etc. That's a substantial list, but is this phenomena of an "ethnoreligious group" easily plausible to save even a few of these languages as well as elements of those cultures?
 
Perhaps if you have a seperate 'Celtic Church' for the British Isles and have it operate through Old Irish rather than Latin; thereby Old Irish would be the educated language of the whole of the British Isles. Alternatively you could have Anglo-SaxonEngland go Orthodox (and avoid the Norman Conquest), and so have Old English be the language of the Bible in that church. This might help slow down the evolution of the English language, but certainly not stop it.
 
Perhaps if you have a seperate 'Celtic Church' for the British Isles and have it operate through Old Irish rather than Latin; thereby Old Irish would be the educated language of the whole of the British Isles. Alternatively you could have Anglo-SaxonEngland go Orthodox (and avoid the Norman Conquest), and so have Old English be the language of the Bible in that church. This might help slow down the evolution of the English language, but certainly not stop it.

You present two separate scenarios. The British language is indeed one language which might've survived using this principle I outlined in my OP. Yes, I know it survived in the form of Welsh and Cornish, but perhaps instead it might've survived in a different dialect which would dominate OTL England.

Without the Norman conquest, I'm convinced English would look far more like Frisian instead of anything like modern English (of course it would have many French and Latinate loanwords, but the same way other modern Germanic languages do). Not quite a religious thing. And Old English already had Bible translations into it.

I want to say that British acts as a counterexample, since they were conquered by mostly pagan Germanic peoples and adopted their language in the end, but I'm not really aware of the modern historiography on the Saxon conquest so I'm probably just quoting a grossly simplified version of what modern historians interpret the event to be. As a side note, British Romance, the indigenous Romance language to the British Isles, might also be preserved in the way I stated somehow, although it wouldn't come from the Irish church.
 
I do think religions can aid the survival of languages by giving them institutional support. In the case of Ireland, the Catholic Church on the island made the decision at some point in the 19th century to embrace English. Perhaps, without even changing the religion, there could be a timeline in which the church elects to maintain Irish instead? Could there be a situation in which speaking English is equated with Protestantism and Irish with Catholicism?
 
I do think religions can aid the survival of languages by giving them institutional support. In the case of Ireland, the Catholic Church on the island made the decision at some point in the 19th century to embrace English. Perhaps, without even changing the religion, there could be a timeline in which the church elects to maintain Irish instead? Could there be a situation in which speaking English is equated with Protestantism and Irish with Catholicism?

That would certainly help add a new dimension to sectarian tensions in Ireland, since even now in Northern Ireland, aren't Irish speakers (whatever few were left and people who learned Irish) generally Republicans?
 
Now here's a case where this might be very interesting (for Europe, at least). It's been discussed before on here, "what if there was a Northern Church" for the Germanic peoples--basically following Arian doctrine or something. Point is, Germanic Christianity becoming its own thing and separate branch.

If this happened, the impact could be huge on zones where Germanic peoples migrated to. Could we see the remnants of groups like the Noric speaking peoples of Austria, the Gauls (and their Gaulish language), and possibly some pre-Roman languages of Spain (Cantabrian, Ceretanian?) holding onto their language by keeping to their faith? Or perhaps adopting a different faith than their neighbours and managing to survive through the centuries that way. The same could go for Germanic peoples as well--non-Germanic Christianity attracts a small following in northern Europe, possibly creating an interesting linguistic scenario (a surviving East Germanic language?).
 

Vuru

Banned
It's easy, but depends on the situation

It's more of a preserver of culture however, Hebrew was extinct and used as a liturgical language and a lingua franca between various Jews, until a dude started speaking it exclusively because reasons, however, the culture remained more or less intact

another example is the Western Balkan, where a single nation got split up by two different religions (later 3), causing different cultures to arise
 
Religion and then common cultural and institutions are perhaps the greatest preservers of culture aside from victory in warfare and reproduction. For example, look at China, due to common state and cultural instituions which had its root in Chinese folk religion, they have created a vast cultural world of its own including over 1 billion people, despite numerous invasions and new religions. Hindustan is another example, it has developed from very early religious and cultural traits into a vast religious and caste structure that withstood invasions for over 1000 years from those of different religions and culture and still to this day, claim over 1 billion people. One example that goes against this train of thought is Rome in its conversion to Christianity or at least its transfer towards Christian coexistence and then into Christian dominance or in Malay-Sumatra (not Java) with the move to Islam from Buddhism-Hinduism.
 
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