Talking with god, talking about god: socialising congregants into multilingual practices in a Seventh-day Adventist Church in Mauritius

Using as a starting point the view that faith literacies constitute an important site for socialisation into multilingualism, the present case study focuses on spiritual leaders as agents of language, literacy and religious socialisation in a Seventh-day Adventist Church (TR SDA Church) in multilingual Mauritius. Participant observations of the spiritual leaders’ language and literacy practices were carried out during two communal routine faith activities: prayers and sermons. These observations were supplemented with conversations with the focal participants for further insights into their in situ faith literacies. Two main religio-linguistic phenomena were observed. First, the spiritual leaders intuitively and spontaneously merged and meshed local languages during prayers and sermons. Second, they intentionally drew on language resources from and beyond the multilingual repertoire they share with congregants when engaging in exegesis during the sermons. We thus argue that, through their regular and publicdelivery of prayers and sermons , the spiritual leaders socialise congregants into layered ways of employing and deploying multilingual resources as part of socio-religiously appropriate language and literacy practices, knowledge-seeking and knowledge-construction practices, and, by extension, the beliefs and mindsets underlying these practices.