Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is a phenomenon or practice in which people utter words or speech-like sounds, often thought by believers to be languages unknown to the speaker. One definition used by linguists is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehensible meaning. In some cases, as part of religious practice, some believe it to be a divine language unknown to the speaker. Glossolalia is practiced in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, as well as in other religions. Sometimes a distinction is made between "glossolalia" and "xenolalia", or "xenoglossy", which specifically relates to the belief that the language being spoken is a natural language previously unknown to the speaker.
Etymology Glossolalia is a borrowing of the γλωσσολαλία (glossolalía), which is a compound of the γλῶσσα (glossa) 'tongue, language' and λαλέω (laleō) 'to speak, talk, chat, prattle, make a sound'. The Greek expression (in various forms) appears in the New Testament in the books of Acts and First Corinthians. In Acts 2, the followers of Christ receive the Holy Spirit and speak in the languages of at least fifteen countries or ethnic groups. The exact phrase speaking in tongues has been used at least since the translation of the New Testament into Middle English in the Wycliffe Bible in the 14th century. Frederic Farrar first used the word glossolalia in 1879.
Linguistics In 1972, William J. Samarin, a linguist from the University of Toronto, published a thorough assessment of Pentecostal glossolalia. His assessment was based on a large sample of glossolalia recorded in public and private Christian meetings in Italy, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Canada, and the United States over the course of five years. His wide range of subjects included the Puerto Ricans of the Bronx, the snake handlers of the Appalachians and Spiritual Christians from Russia (Dukh-i-zhizniki) in east Los Angeles county. Samarin found that glossolalic speech does resemble human language in some respects. The speaker uses accent, rhythm, intonation and pauses to break up the speech into distinct units. Each unit is itself made up of syllables. The syllables are formed from consonants and vowels found in a language known to the speaker:
It is verbal behaviour that consists of using a certain number of consonants and vowels ... in a limited number of syllables that in turn are organized into larger units that are taken apart and rearranged pseudogrammatically ... with variations in pitch, volume, speed and intensity. [Glossolalia] consists of strings of syllables, made up of sounds taken from all those that the speaker knows, put together more or less haphazardly but emerging nevertheless as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like rhythm and melody. Others have confirmed the sounds used are already known by the speaker. Felicitas Goodman, a psychological anthropologist and linguist, also found that the speech of glossolalists reflected the patterns of speech of the speaker's native language. These findings were confirmed by Kavan (2004). Samarin found that the resemblance to human language was only at surface level and concluded that glossolalia is "only a facade of language". He reached this conclusion because the syllable string did not form words, the stream of speech was not internally organized, and – most importantly of all – there was no systematic relationship between units of speech and concepts. Humans use language to communicate, but glossolalia does not. Therefore, he concluded that glossolalia is not "a specimen of human language because it is neither internally organized nor systematically related to the world man perceives". On the basis of his linguistic analysis, Samarin defined Pentecostal glossolalia as "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead". Simultaneous with Samarin, Felicitas Goodman studied a number of Pentecostal communities in the United States, the Caribbean, and Mexico, these included English, Spanish and Mayan speaking groups. She compared what she found with recordings of non-Christian rituals from Africa, Borneo, Indonesia and Japan. She took into account both the segmental structure (such as sounds, syllables, phrases) and the supra-segmental elements (rhythm, accent, intonation) and concluded that there was no distinction between what was practised by the Pentecostal Protestants and the followers of other religions.
History
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