Walk Away Glossolalia: the gift of gibberish By D. James Janes Strolling through the telev

Walk Away

Glossolalia: the gift of gibberish
By D. James Janes

Strolling through the television one day, I encountered one of the 
many televangelists available for video perusal. Normally, the image 
of a TV preacher would grace my screen for several milliseconds at 
most, but this time something caught my attention. This guy was speaking 
a little funny. At first, I thought that he was perhaps speaking Spanish. 
But having three courses under my belt forced me to discount this 
possibility when I was unable to recognize anything as Spanish. In 
fact, I could not detect any familiar sound at all, from any language. 


Well, I must admit that at one point it sounded as if this preacher 
- Robert Tilton - had spoken a phrase familiar to those of us with 
children, "Kowwabunga, dude!" - the famous victory cry of the Teenage 
Mutant Ninja Turtles. Suddenly, the preacher stopped speaking whatever 
language he had been speaking and began to talk in completely understandable 
English. Ah, now I understood. He had been "speaking in tongues," 
or, to use the psycholinguistic, he had been engaged in an act of 
glossolalia.

Glossolalia, which usually occurs within a religious context, consists 
of unintelligible yet seemingly structured speech. In most instances, 
the speaker is experiencing an altered state of consciousness very 
much like self-hypnosis. The origin of glossolalia is commonly attributed 
to the early Christian church. It was first mentioned in Acts, when 
the apostles, on the day of Pentecost, "began to speak with other 
tongues." The bizarre behavior gained credence and spread when Paul 
claimed that he and others were able to interpret messages delivered 
in an "unknown tongue." Through the centuries, the popularity of glossolalia 
has fluctuated, but it has never disappeared.

The most recent resurgence of tongue-speaking took place in the 19602 
when it was spewed out of the mouths of thousands of Pentecostals 
at numerous tent revivals held throughout that decade. Interested 
members of other religious groups adopted the practice and incorporated 
it into their own system of worship. And, as I found out, glossolalists 
are even on TV. While the existence of speaking in tongues may not 
be a revelation to some people (there are more than four million speaks 
of glossolalia in the U.S. alone), many are unaware that the phenomenon 
is a global one, not attached exclusively to Christianity. All cases, 
however, share a disputation of genuineness.

What concerns us here, depiste the fascinating psychological and social 
dimensions of glossolalia, is the linguistic feasibility of the event. 
Is it a language? More specifically, since the ascertainment of an 
existing language would be relatively straightforward, if it is a 
language, is it one that the speaker knows or has been exposed to? 
Is it language-like? Does it follow any reasonable phonological, morphological, 
or syntactic pattern? Does it differ significantly (linguistically) 
from the speaker's native language? Are there any aberrant, alien 
phonemes? In short, is glossolalia an example of a strange linguistic 
reality, or is it a display of self-induced vocal hysteria, an ejaculation 
of gibberish?

Speaking a language foreign to one's native tongue without having 
ever learned it or ever having heard it is technically called xenoglossia, 
and not quite the same thing as glossolalia. The two types of verbal 
abnormalities are often linked together because the Bible is unclear 
whether the apostles were speaking in an unfamiliar foreign language 
or all uttering in one unknown tongue. Either way, there has been 
only one credible account of anyone speaking a foreign language with 
no previous exposure to it. This one exception was a Jewish woman 
who, under hypnosis, slipped into another personality able to speak 
in Swedish. The typical claim usually turns out to be a hoax.

One of the characteristics of glossolalia is that it can resemble 
known languages, since there are only so many speech sounds physiologically 
possible. Not surprisingly, glossolalists may string together certain 
consonant-vowel combinations that are phonemically similar to a foreign 
language. Equally likely would be the possibility of a glossolalia-produced 
meaningful unit, a short word fully recognizable from a foreign language. 
Of many possibilities might be the hearing of the word _para_ or _por_, 
both variations of the article _for_, amidst a glossolalia string. 
Despite the preponderance of unfamiliar "words" (and phonemes), the 
listener might attribute to the speaker the ability to speak Spanish. 
Akin to this kind of "successful" linguistic search are the notorious 
discoveries of hidden messages in record albums played backwards.

The unlikelihood of xenoglossia does not rule out the claim that glossolalists 
are speaking some type of language. After all, one would not expect 
the tongues of angels to be as culturally or geographically specific 
as German or Spanish. No, this language should be universal in nature, 
potentially understandable by everyone, with a vocabulary completely 
different from all other languages. Like every other rule-based language, 
even the angels would need a regulated system of lingual communications 
in order to maintain any semblance of order, lest all hell break loose. 
Within the speech of millions of glossolalists should be found a grammatical 
set with shared sounds, shared words, and a shared structure. 

Syntactical analyses of glossolalia have yielded no linguistic patterns 
of tongue-speakers. Unfortunately, the architecture of a glossolalia 
blurb is rather inscrutable and nearly impossible to break down into 
sentences or phrases. And yet, most listeners and linguists agree 
that speakers of tongues incporate grammatical elements into their 
speech that would seem to be indicators of a syntactical arrangement. 
There are the necessary inflections and pauses and rhythmic cadences 
that appear to organize the verbiage into macrosegments (sentences), 
microsegments (words), phonemes. One theory explains the metered vocalization 
as symptomatic of a rhythmical discharge of subcortical strucutres 
operating during a trance state. If speech is biologically interrupted, 
it could appear to be a sentence pause. It would certainly be hard 
to catch "words" being cut off or notice illogical breaks in expression 
when neither can be identified.

Since sentences and phrases are generally composed of smaller units 
called words, semantical research on microsegments might isolate a 
glossolalia glossary (minus the definitions). If, on the other hand, 
a study of glossolalia should support the hypothesis that there is 
no lexicon among its practitioners, a larger assumption could be made 
that sentences are inconceivable without words. The evidence is mixed. 
One case study that inventoried identifiable (repeated) microsegments 
would commit no more than to say that "glossolalia is at least remotely 
language-like." Other findings, based on both longitudinal and comparative 
studies, have elicited less tepid conclusions from researchers who 
believe that "a vocabulary does seem to be operative" within and among 
glossolalists. They provide one example of a "word" shared in slightly 
altered form from various tongues-speakers across America. The word 
is "shun-da" and eight different variations are offered. Unfortunately, 
we are never told what this word means, if indeed it means anything 
at all. Neologisms (newly coined words) are the trademark of glossolalia. 
Meanings are another story. 

The strongest correlation between glossolalia and language comes from 
an analysis of phonemes. As mentioned previously, it is statistically 
probably that glossolalists will reiterate familiar consonant, vowel, 
or diphthong sounds simly because the vocal tract can only produce 
a finite base of phonemes. If, however, the tongues of angels is a 
language unique and apart from all the other known languages in the 
world, then one would expect glossolalists to reproduce significantly 
fewer phonemes from his or her native language. This is exactly what 
Michael T. Motley found in his case study of a 61-year-old male Pentecostal. 
On the basis of his phonetic analysis, he concluded that glossolalia 
is language-like. Ultimately, however, he could not concede that glossolalia 
is a language.

An alternative hypothesis to phoneme expectancy might be that glossolalia 
is a psycholingual catharsis. Entering into an altered state of uncontrolled, 
energetic, spontaneous verbal creativity, it seems reasonable that 
a great variety of sounds could ensue. Temporarily detached from a 
conscious connection to his or her natural language, the vocal tract 
of the glossolalist is allowed to contort into otherwise unfamiliar 
positions. Without basing phonemic expectations within the context 
of an unknown language, deviant phonemes would be more likely to occur. 
This does not mean that glossolalia would be any less language-like. 
It would mean, however, that speaking in tongues is closer to a schizophrenic's 
word-salad than a divine language. This is not supported by research, 
which has shown both schizophrenese and faked glossolalia to be much 
less language-like than (and I hesitate to say this) the real thing.

So, where does that leave us? William Samarin, a long-time researcher 
into the speaking of tongues, summarizes:

When the full apparatus of linguistic science comes to bear on glossolalia, 
this turns out to be only a facade of language - although at times 
a very good one indeed. For when we comprehend what language is, we 
must conclude that no glossa, no matter how well constructed, is a 
specimen of human language, because it is neither internally organized 
nor systematically related to the world man perceives.

Samarin's conjecture is in line with that of most linguists and psychologists, 
who are impressed with the phenomenon, but not nearly convinced that 
it represents any type of language. It is an event with meaning and 
power to those who exhibit the behavior, and to those who claim to 
be able to understand it. But in the words of Skipp Porteous, a former 
tongues-speaking Pentecostal minister, "as far as it being any sort 
of language, that is pure nonsense - it is gibberish." A Teenage Mutant 
Ninja Turtle could not have put it any better.


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