Religious language on the Internet (on the material of Russian and Polish studies)

In the modern world, against the development of new information technologies began not only the penetration of the Internet in all spheres of human life, but the blurring of the boundaries between these spheres and the Internet, penetration of the real in the virtual and the creation of new virtual realities. Such world religions as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are forced to take this process into account. Despite the fact that the presence of the Internet in the various religious institutions is not always the same, and the Internet has created new structures that do not exist in the real religious life (new religions, sects, etc.), and the attitude to this phenomenon is ambiguous, religious Internet communication, religious Internet discourse are already an established fact, which has been studied by numerous Russian and Polish linguists. In religious language, as in the entire universum of language, there is a genre differentiation. The religious language of the Internet is also not free of this differentiation. As a result, research in the field of religious Internet genology began to be published. The results of research by Polish and Russian linguists show that Internet genres and real language genres have not only common features, but also differences. The article analyzes prayer on the Internet as a genre of religious language. Attention is also drawn to the fact that the boundaries between the core and the periphery of the religious language on the Internet are blurring, which can lead to a new wave of secularization. The author of the article believes that one of the tasks of theologians and linguists is to purposefully preserve the religious language on the Internet and, above all, its proto-genres, one of which is prayer.