EN
The term religious sociolect (religiolect) in this essay bears the meaning of a relatively stable, socially marked subsystem of the national language satisfying the needs for communication of a limited social group — the members of a particular religious community, reflecting a theocentric picture of the world and having specific lexical, phonetic-prosodical, formative and grammatical features. The language of the Orthodox clergy and church-going believers represents an independent microsystem, a religiolect belonging to Serbian national language, with its specific parameters and confessionally marked elements of all the levels of the language system organisation (orthoepic, graphic and orthographic, grammatical and lexical). The extralinguistic basis of the Orthodox sociolect consists of specific characteristics of the picture of world of the religious Serbian language speakers, as well as the constituents of their mentality — protectivity, sacrality, catholicity.