The sacred and the banal: linguistic landscapes inside the Grand Mosque of Mecca

Abstract

This paper sheds light on Fishmanian understandings of domains as clusters of people, aural behaviours, activities and artefacts through the exploration of sacred and banal domains within the Grand Mosque of Mecca, a religious site that serves as a pilgrimage for Muslims of different nationalities and language backgrounds. The overall patterns reveal varied inter-related clusters of people, languages, sound, artefacts and activities, adding insights into the overlapping ways that the sacred and the banal play out in this large public open space. The findings highlight the continued usefulness of domains for the contemporary study of research into the language of religion and for the study of broader semiotic assemblages present in the linguistic landscape.

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