Some texts are written to be felt, rather than solely read or seen. This article is about audience design and the transformation of language into something sacred. We look at how religious and ceremonial writing distances itself from the everyday, how it is stylised, elevated, formalised and sacralised. We begin with hieroglyphics, and the story runs through scripture, prayer, politics and poetry, right to the present day.

Hieroglyphics: An Audience of None

In ancient Egypt, writing was not democratic. They were never meant for common reading. They were expensive to produce, carved by trained artisans, shaped by priests and scribes and designed, not for people, but the divine.

Many hieroglyphic inscriptions in temples and tombs were addressed to the gods or to the dead. They conveyed rituals frozen in stone: names, prayers, offerings, spells. They were texts not to be understood by the masses, but to be received by higher forces.

People were not expected to read them at all. They were meant to stand in awe, not unlike the reactions we still have when we consider medieval cathedrals rising from stone and stretching seemingly to the heavens: Durham, York, Ulm, Cologne…

Just like the architecture of cathedrals is performative and ceremonial, so too were hieroglyphs. Meaning wasn’t fully in the words themselves, but in the presence of the words. Hieroglyphs were sacred symbols, embedded in the fabric of eternity.

Perhaps these were the earliest examples of sacralised language through audience design. This was language shared to impress, to sanctify, to be viewed from a respectful distance. This was what it communicated.

Audience Design

In sociolinguistics, Audience Design refers to how speakers shape their language based on their audience. A teacher speaks differently to a student than to a colleague. A political speech differs from a private email or a WhatsApp message. Language is bent towards the listener.

What happens when the intended audience is not present in a physical way or cannot even read?

This is when writing becomes symbolic. It no longer serves the immediate function of communication. Instead, it serves memory, ritual, permanence. Over time, this style becomes even more elevated, untouchable, even sacred. In Audience Design terms, who were hieroglyphs intended for? Who was the audience? The gods. And, as a by-product, to impress, shock, awe and intimidate the masses.

Sacred Language Is Often Archaic by Design

This pattern of language becoming elevated and distanced runs through religious history in many cultures:

King James English

When the King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611, it used a style that was formal, majestic and resonant with poem and rhythm. To its contemporary readers, it was serious, stately, but not unfamiliar. It was accessible to the literate.

Today, the archaic forms, such as ‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘hearken’, ‘beget’, create a sense of distance. It is still used precisely because it sounds sacred, elevated, removed from the common tongue. It was once contemporary, albeit formal. Now it has become mystical, canonical. The same occurs with the Lutheran bible (1534), the Louis Segond French translation (1874) and the Reina-Valera Spanish bible (1602).

Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic (al-Fusha), the language of the Qur’an, was a living, literary register in the early Islamic centuries. It was poetic, compact, rich in metaphor, but even at the time understood only by the educated.

Over time, as dialects evolved across the Arabic-speaking world, from Oman to Mauritania, al-Fusha froze. It remained the language of scripture, sermons, religious law, divine recitation. It was preserved in sound and symbol, unchanged and unchangeable.

Today, millions of Muslims recite Qur’anic Arabic daily without understanding every word. An imam in Dakar or Dushanbe may not have any working knowledge of contemporary Arabic. But the recitation of Qur’anic Arabic itself is sacred. The beauty of sound becomes a spiritual act.

The Latin Mass

A similar phenomenon occurred in Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), when Mass was celebrated exclusively in Latin. Most parishioners could not understand the words directly, yet through repetition, rhythm and ritual, they participated fully: responses were memorised, intoned and embodied through collective practice. Latin, through distance from daily speech, became part of the sacred fabric of experience.

This dynamic is achingly captured in the film Joyeux Noel (2005), depicting the 1914 Christmas truce during World War I. In a makeshift Mass in no-man’s land, Scottish, French and German soldiers – enemies on the battlefield – all join together in the Latin responses. In that moment, Latin, once the language of division and hierarchy, becomes the lingua franca of peace: not fully understood, but deeply shared. It is a remarkable scene that devastates. I would love to think that it really happened.

A Sacred Distance

The distance between the creator of the message and the receiver, between word and meaning, clears space for reverence. It invites slowness and contemplation. It compels the receiver to return for more.

In the modern age of clarity and accessibility, this runs counter to our instincts. In sacred contexts, however, opacity is part of the power. A liturgical phrase that defies instant comprehension demands deeper engagement. It requires study, reflection and repetition.

The process of the sacralisation of language is as follows:

·       It is removed from everyday use.

·       It is ritualised.

·       It resists simplification.

·       It privileges form over function.

Performance over Understanding

This phenomenon is not just religious. It appears anywhere that language becomes ceremonial. Legal English is presented in a very similar way, as are national anthems, constitutional texts and academic prose. A lot of medical writing springs from this pedigree: dense, stylised, opaque to outsiders and resistant to revision from within.

In each of these cases, the language distances itself from the audience, not to obscure meaning maliciously, but to preserve ritual and authority.

Like hieroglyphs on a temple wall, the language performs a function beyond comprehension. It signals stability, reverence and tradition.

Ironically, this pattern persists even in a world that tries to prioritise accessibility.

The Gospel of John opens with the verse

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

This not only describes the divine in language, but it asserts that the divine is language. The source terms, logos, means ‘word’, but also ‘reason’ and ‘order’. This means that the divine – the Word – is both communication and essence.

This makes audience design in religious texts not just a matter of stylistic choice, but of the very nature of reality. For many, to encounter sacred language is to contemplate divinity in the form of symbols.

And this is perhaps the paradox of sacred writing: it wants to reach us but not quite all the way. If it did, then it would become too familiar, too plain. It might stop being sacred.

Sacred language preserves its power by making the reader slow down and approach carefully. It is not about being easily understood. It constructs a threshold to a building that demands reverence, not convenience.

This is a building that we do not enter into lightly.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025