Glossolalia

"Speaking in Tongues" redirects here. For other uses, see Speaking in Tongues
(disambiguation).
"Tongues" redirects here. For other uses, see Tongue (disambiguation).

For the album by Steve Walsh, see Glossolalia (album).

Icon depicting the Theotokostogether with the apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, indicated by "cloven
tongues like as of fire" above their heads.

Glossolalia or speaking in tongues is a phenomenon in which people appear to speak in

languages unknown to them. One definition used by linguists is the fluid vocalizing of
speech-like syllables that lack any readily comprehended meaning, in some cases as part
of religious practice in which it is believed to be a divine language unknown to the
speaker.[1] Glossolalia is practiced in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity as well as in
other religions.[2][3] The term derives from glōssais lalein, a Greek phrase used in the New
Testament meaning "to speak in or with tongues [i.e., other languages]" (Acts 2:4, 1
Corinthians 14:18).
Sometimes a distinction is made between "glossolalia" and "xenolalia" or "xenoglossy",
which specifically designates when the language being spoken is a natural
language previously unknown to the speaker.[4] However, this distinction is not universally
made, and the New Testament uses the phrase glōssais lalein in at least one passage to
refer to speaking in languages known to others but not to the speakers.[citation needed]

Contents

 1Etymology
 2Linguistics
 3History
o 3.1Classical antiquity
o 3.2400 to 1900
o 3.320th century
 4Christianity
 o 4.1Theological explanations
o 4.2Biblical practice
o 4.3Pentecostal and charismatic practice
 5Non-Christian practice
 6Medical research
 7See also
 8References
o 8.1Bibliography
 9Further reading
 10External links

Etymology[edit]
Glossolalia is from the Greek word γλωσσολαλία, itself a compound of the words γλῶσσα
(glossa), meaning "tongue" or "language"[5] and λαλέω (laleō), "to speak, talk, chat, prattle,
or to make a sound".[6] 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.[7] Frederic
Farrar first used the word glossolalia in 1879.[8]

Linguistics[edit]
In 1972, William J. Samarin, a linguist from the University of Toronto, published a thorough
assessment of Pentecostal glossolalia that became a classic work on its linguistic
characteristics.[9] 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 the Spiritual
Christians from Russia in Los Angeles (Pryguny, Dukh-i-zhizniki).
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 being formed from
consonants and vowels taken from 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.[10]
[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.[11]
That the sounds are taken from the set of sounds already known to the speaker is
confirmed by others. 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.[12] These findings were confirmed by Kavan (2004).[13]
Samarin found that the resemblance to human language was merely on the surface and so
concluded that glossolalia is "only a facade of language".[14] 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".[14] 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".[15]
Practitioners of glossolalia may disagree with linguistic researchers and claim that they are
speaking human languages (xenoglossia). 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
o