To sort of underscore what others have said regarding tongue as language - here's a question that is frequently asked particularly of linguists:
“How do you know that (modern) 'tongues' are not a language; heavenly, angelic, or otherwise?” "How can you prove that they're not?"
Great question! It’s one however, that definitely does not have a quick and easy answer.
I’ll try and sum it up as best and concisely as I can (apologies for the long post - again). Whether solid enough 'proof', I will leave to the reader to decide.....
When discussing what makes up language, there are a number of factors one must consider. Let’s start with one of the easier ones; phonology. Phonology concerns itself with the sounds of a given language and how those sounds are put together such that they become acceptable to all speakers of that language. Phonology also defines what is allowed and disallowed with respect to how the sounds are put together. In addition, suprasegmental elements such as stress (accent/pitch/tone) are also considered.
With tongues (hereafter T-speech) phonology is unique to the phenomenon; a speaker’s T-speech will only contain those sounds found in that speaker’s native language and any other language s/he may be familiar with (actively or passively). It’s important to keep in mind that the sounds may also contain those found in other languages the speaker is familiar with – this is something that’s frequently overlooked and leads people to think that because some sounds produced do not occur in the speaker’s native language, it must be legitimate “tongues”.
Further, even within that set of sounds (called a ‘phonemic inventory’), a ‘tongue’ will typically only contain a select smaller number (a subset) of those sounds. Typically, this subset will consist of sounds that are easier to produce in the vocal tract. For example, it’s much easier to produce a ‘sh’ sound than it is to produce a ‘j’ sound. The ‘sh’ does not require a great deal of effort to produce.
What is also found in T-speech is that any disallowed combinations of sounds in the speaker’s native language (and those s/he is also familiar with) will also be disallowed in the speaker’s T-speech.
For the most part, accent, tone, word stress, etc. will also echo the speaker’s native language.
From the above, one can easily see that T-speech will never contain a different, unique phonemic inventory specific to that ‘tongue’ which totally differs from the speaker’s native language. We are simply dealing with a subset of the sounds found in the speaker’s native language typically containing the easiest sounds to produce (linguistically).
As a simple example, an American English speaker’s T-speech will never contain the click sounds found in some languages of southern Africa (unless, of course, that speaker has had contact in some way with those languages).
The fact that ‘tongues’ do not contain any unique sounds not found in the speaker’s own language(s) however cannot be the sole defining factor of whether you have an actual language or not. Other things also need to be considered.
The main defining factor for most Linguists with respect to T-speech is the ‘words’ themselves.
Every language contains something called ‘morphemes’. These are the smallest meaningful units in a given language. Morphemes come in two flavors; free and bound. As an example, take the word “players” – this word contains three morphemes; one free, two bound. ‘Play’ is a verb; it describes an action. It is also a free morpheme as it can stand alone as a word all by itself. The ‘–er’ is a morpheme of English that takes a verb and creates a noun out of it denoting the doer of the action described in the verb. In this case the ‘–er’ indicates “(some)one who plays”. It is a bound morpheme since it cannot be used on its own. Finally, we have the ‘-s’. This is the plural marker in English and it is also a bound morpheme. So ‘players’ has three distinct morphemes which make up the word: “play +er +s”.
My point is that for something to be a language, it must have morphemes; they are the bits and pieces that create language – sounds are put together in syllables and syllables are used to form morphemes. Without morphemes, you don’t have language. It’s just that simple. You may have something that is a façade of language, sounds like one, but it is nonetheless not language.
Morphemes, once put together to make words, are then put together by means of a defined grammar to make phrases. For example, let’s use a ‘noun phrase’ (NP). A non-phrase contains an optional article (definite or indefinite, i.e. ‘the’ or’ a/an’) + a noun + an optional plural marker, i.e. NP= (article) NOUN (plural marker). Other examples of phrases include verb phrase, prepositional phrase, adverb phrase, etc.
All languages have some type of grammar – grammar being simply an agreed upon way in which these phrases are put together to make a cohesive, intelligible sentence to speakers of that language. Grammar also involves an agreed upon way in which to order these words/phrases. This is known as syntax.
Here’s the thing…..
T-speech does not contain any of the above features. You cannot write a ‘sentence’ down in T-speech and break it down into phrases and then break those phrases down into individual morphemes. T-speech does not contain morphemes and, as mentioned above, without morphemes, you don’t have language.
If you were to write down a ‘sentence’ of T-speech, there’s no way anyone can point to a given ‘word’ in that sentence and say, “this means ‘X’”, or “this little part on this word here denotes the plural.”
Further, a given morpheme in a language cannot have several different ‘interpretations/meanings’.
Let’s take a look at this....
In T-speech, if one were to record a sample and play it to several people who ‘interpret tongues,’ one would get several different interpretations; usually totally different and unrelated to each other. Occasionally, some similarities may be noted between interpretations, but given the religious context, an occasional similarity is to be expected.
Language simply does not work that way. You can’t have multiple meanings/interpretations for the same sentence; As someone once said, “Pentecostal Darwinism does not exist – you can’t have multiple meanings to justify an obvious discrepancy.“ You can however certainly have subtleties that change the nuance of what’s being said, but “The brown dog is big.” can never be “The white cat is small.” which is what happens frequently with T-speech with respect to multiple interpretations for the same ‘sentence’.
T-speech fails on even the simplest definition and criteria of what communication and language consists of and what it is.
In addition to the above, one other element must also be considered. Languages will contain a lexicon. A lexicon is simply a ‘dictionary’, if you will, of morphemes with their meanings. When one learns a language, one is learning a lexicon as well – all the meaningful particles of that language and their assigned meaning. T-speech does not have anything even remotely suggestive of a lexicon.
If one were to imagine a purely hypothetical situation just for the purpose of this exercise – an alien craft lands and beings emerge and begin speaking to humans in a language which no one on earth has ever heard before. That language will contain morphemes, a grammar, a lexicon, and although we may not have the physical ability to reproduce them, phonemes. These things are universal to language. Even the meowing patterns of cats, the songs of the humpback whale, and the ‘dancing patterns’ of honeybees all conform to the criteria of ‘communication’ with respect to a single general meaning to a specific pattern. T-speech does not have this – can’t have several different meanings for the same utterance.
Lastly, there are no two ‘tongues’ that are exactly alike. Each one is unique to the individual speaker. Oftentimes speakers report being able to produce several different ‘tongues’ – This is just the subconscious drawing upon a different subset set of phonemes – the same set isn’t always used every time a person speaks and thus, it comes across as a totally different ‘tongue’.
That said, there’s a lot of copying of particular ‘phrases’ or ‘words’ that well known pastors use that speakers will unconsciously pick up on and copy. Whether or not it’s from the internet and various YouTube type videos, I don’t know. One that I hear frequently is “kishanda” usually pronounced “kee-SHAHN-dah” (which I would argue it is simply derived from a corrupted pronunciation of the English word “Sunday”).
Another rarer element of T-speech is the corrupting of actual words (in the speaker’s native language) to fit the syllable and sound structure of that speaker’s T-speech. One speaker from Australia (whose T-speech was studied and transcribed) used a lot of such words.
“Phrases” in T-speech are often inter-dispersed with praise phrases in the speaker’s native language. It’s not uncommon to hear a speaker say things like “Praise Jesus”, “Hallelujah”, “In Jesus’ name”, etc. while engaged in T-speech. It seems to lend to the ‘authenticity’ of the practice.
Given the above factors, there is simply no way to argue, no matter how you slice and dice it, for modern tongues as language.
There are, as many people point out, thousands of languages in the world, even ancient ones that are no longer spoken – how do we know tongues isn’t one of them? By the same criteria as described above. And, yes, there are indeed thousands of languages spoken in the world today – but not one of them is remotely close to what people are producing in their glossolalia/tongues.
On a more esoteric note/new-agey note (and one can either take this or leave it), if tongues were a "universal heavenly language", there'd only be one; not one unique one for each individual speaker; that just doesn't stand to reason. Why would there be a need for more than one?
One could also argue that tongues, being a ‘heavenly’ language does not need to have all these things described above. It’s a “heavenly language” not bound by any human definitions of language. The constraints described above however, are, as mentioned, universal – if you utter a string of syllables and call it language, those syllables must have some type of structure which defines it and assign it meaning (morphemic structure, grammar, syntax, etc.), otherwise it’s simply free vocalization produced by the subconscious; non-cognitive non-language utterances (NC-NLU’s) – the best working and most accurate description of modern T-speech.
Without getting into lengthy discussions (already done on other post topics regarding tongues), in all cases where the Bible talks about ‘tongues’ it is simply a reference to real language – there’s nothing in those passages that cannot be explained in the context of real language. I would even argue that in some cases, given the context of a particular situation, it’s much easier to understand the passage in terms of real language than it is ‘tongues’.
