Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Jesus said believers were the “salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). Salt is essential for life and food, also in languages it plays an important role. This study examines the usage of salt in Taiwanese Southern Min and German and the social implications of the language use. Taiwan and Germany are two very distinct societies particularly in terms of religion and people there speak very different languages that belong to two unique language families. We explore how the religions in these two countries influence the languages they use in daily life and how that reveal the religious socialization per se. We compare salt collocations in Taiwanese Southern Min (hereafter TSM) and German with data taken from corpora such as Taiwan Min-Nan Proverb Quadrisyllabic Phrases (Yuan-Chih University 2012) and Deutscher Wortschatz (University Leipzig 1998-2012). We investigate their collocation types and idioms with the research questions asking: What do the collocations reveal to the language user in linguistic variation and culture differences? As languages are used every day and are developing along social change, we can observe the religious socialization in the given languages.