Religious language practices of young people in the digital space

Abstract

This paper explores adolescents’ religious language practices in digital contexts and examines the implications for religious language competence. Based on a systematic review of existing research, it synthesizes empirical findings on young people’s religious communication and complements them with a corpus-linguistic case study of YouTube comments. The findings show that religious language in digital environments is shaped by hybridity, multimodality, performativity, resonance orientation, and practices of positioning. Religious language competence thus emerges less as the mastery of individual registers than as the ability to navigate a digital grammar of religious communication and to switch appropriately between different modes of speaking. From this perspective, digital religious language competence takes the form of a so-called switch competence.