I may have posted this on another thread – I honestly do not remember, but it does not appear to be posted here. Apologies if it amounts to a ‘double post’ and apologies for a considerably long post here.
A question that is frequently asked is “How do you know that modern 'Tongues' are not a language; heavenly, angelic, or otherwise?”
Great question! But it’s one that definitely does not have a quick and easy answer.
I’ll try and sum it up as best and concisely as I can.
First, this may be kind of stating the obvious, but real languages, whether currently spoken or long dead, are immediately recognizable as such. By this I mean that it may take a bit to identify the actual specific language, but it will nonetheless be recognized as real language.
This simply does not happen with modern Pentecostal/Charismatic tongues. In fact, it does not happen with any type of glossolalia, whether spoken by a Christian here in the US or an Evenki shaman in Siberia,
Some people are quick to tell me that I am trying to ‘explain/understand the spiritual in earthly terms’, or something along those lines, or that there are thousands of languages in the word, how do you know tongues is not one of these (whether ancient or modern)??
There are indeed many intangible things in religion that that must be taken solely on faith alone; they cannot be proven, nor can they be disproven.
Tongues however are not one of these things – they are something very tangible, something very physical. Tongues can be and have been examined, analyzed and studied with all results yielding the same conclusions.
So how/why is modern tongues not language?
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 the result is acceptable to all speakers of that language. Phonology also defines what is allowed and disallowed with respect to how these sounds are put together. In addition, suprasegmental elements, things like 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 consists of sounds that are easier to produce in the vocal tract than the ones excluded from the subset. For example, it’s much easier to produce a ‘sh’ sound than it is to produce a ‘j’ sound. The ‘sh’ does not require as great a 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 (physiologically).
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). One curious thing that American speakers tend to do concerns the ‘r’ sound. Rather than produce the usual American ‘r’ (as in “red”), they will either turn it into a single flap (like the ‘t’ in most people’s pronunciation of “water”), or they’ll produce a trilled ‘r’ as found in various European languages. Why is this done? It makes the T-speech sound less like American English and speakers tend to perceive what their producing as more “foreign sounding”.
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 factors also need to be considered.
Syllable structure may be taken into account, but really only marginally – typically the syllables of T-speech are simplifies to an all open pattern; that is, they consist of Consonant + Vowel (CV) despite the fact that the speaker’s native language can contain closed syllables (CVC). The fact that the syllable structure of T-speech is simplified from the speaker’s own, again, does not constitute ‘non-language’; there are plenty of languages in the word that have this type of syllable structure (Polynesian languages come immediately to mind)
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, regardless where or by whom the language is spoken, it must have morphemes; they are the bits and pieces that create language itself – sounds are put together in syllables and syllables are used to create 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 a legit language, but it is nonetheless not language.
Morphemes in turn are put together to make words, words are then put together to make phrases by means of a defined grammar. The phrases I’m referring to are linguistic phrases found in language; for example, a Noun-Phrase (NP). A noun-phrase contains an optional article (definite or indefinite, i.e. ‘the’ or’ a/an’) + a noun + an optional plural marker, so: 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 of interpretations, occasional similarity or overlap 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’.
Further, another complicating issue is that the ‘interpretation’ of any given utterance is typically inordinately longer than the actual glossic string. There are indeed languages in the world where one word can often translate into an entire sentence in English, but an entire paragraph or two simply does not happen in any language. Again, without getting into details here, many will argue that T-speech and its subsequent interpretation are totally different phenomenon not at all related to one another.
T-speech fails on even the simplest definition and criteria of what communication and language consists of.
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. The morphemes, grammar and lexicon may be completely alien (no pun intended) to our way of thinking, but they will be there nonetheless. These things are universal to language. Even the meowing patterns of cats, the songs of the humpback whale, and the ‘dancing patterns’ of honeybees, as ‘alien’ as they may seem to us, all conform to the criteria of ‘communication’ with respect to a single general meaning assigned to a specific pattern. T-speech just doesn’t have this – you can’t have several (often distinctly) different meanings for the same utterance; to do so negates the need T-speech in the first place.
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; for some speakers it’s a rather random thing and thus, it comes across as a totally different ‘tongue’.
That said, there’s definitely a lot of copying of particular ‘phrases’ or ‘words’ that well known pastors use that speakers will either consciously or unconsciously pick up on and copy. 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”. This copying of certain words between speakers has become so common with the advent of the computer age and the internet that the words have almost become ‘standardized’. It is noted that these words typically are used to initiate a glossic string which begs the question of whether speakers are using this to, I’m not sure how to word it, “initiate a glossic utterance”, rather than coming up with their own way to initiate a glossic string.
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. Hebrew terms are also not uncommonly heard. These include words such as ‘meshiakh’,’Yeshu’a’, Yahweh, etc. This usage seems to lend to the ‘authenticity’ of the practice of T-speech.
Another characteristic of T-speech not found in language (unless children’s ‘play language’ is taken into consideration) is the repetition of the same syllable several times. This typically occurs at the end of a given glossic string. Some words in languages, particularly if that language has the syllable structure CV and contains a rather limited phonemic inventory (again, languages of Oceana come to mind here), they still will never contain the same syllable repeated multiple times at the end of a given word.
Given all the above factors, there is simply no way to argue 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? It’s rather straightforward: 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 /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 (i.e. countless thousands); that just doesn't stand to logical reasoning. Why would there ever be a need for more than one heavenly/angelic language?
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” after all, and does not need to be bound by any human definitions of language, thus you’re trying to analyze something spiritual/supernatural in earthly terms.
The constraints described further above however, are, as mentioned, universal – if you utter a string of sounds and call it language, those sounds 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.
What about the argument that there are “thousands of languages spoken in the world today, how can anyone know that ‘tongues’ are not one of them?” As previously mentioned, yes, there are indeed thousands of languages spoken in the world today – unfortunately not one of them is remotely close to what people are producing in their glossolalia/tongues.
As one Linguist puts it, “Among us (Linguists), we have heard many hundreds of languages. Furthermore, we have heard representative languages in virtually every group of related languages in the world and have studied at least one representative of related languages from every group of related languages in the ancient world. At worst we may have missed a few small groups in some of the more remote parts of the world. I would estimate that the chances are at least even that if a glossolalic utterance is in a known language, one of us would either recognize the language or recognize that it is similar to some language we are acquainted with, modern or ancient."
This same Linguist further makes this challenge: "Get two recordings, one of a glossolalic utterance and the other in a real language remote from anything I have ever heard. I'm confident that in just a few moments I could tell which is which and why I am sure of it."
As a linguist, I completely concur with his challenge - real language is unmistakable, as is glossolalia/T-speech.
Without getting into further lengthy discussions (already done on other posted 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 the situation, it’s much easier to understand the passage in terms of real language than it is in terms of ‘tongues’.
Modern tongues are simply not what those that ‘speak’ them perceive, want, or need them to be.
Are they a tool by which a person can establish a closer relationship with the divine and thus strengthen their spiritual path? Can their usage even aid in the physical/spiritual healing process? To both questions…Yes, absolutely! This is done in both Christian and non-Christian usage, I would argue, on a daily basis.
It must be noted however, that the use of this tool is highly dependent on one’s faith; the two go hand-in-hand. Tongues cannot correctly be used without faith, no matter what religious path that faith may encompass. For many, both Christians and non-Christians alike, tongues are in fact a very powerful tool.
Are they a heavenly/angelic language or a language spoken somewhere on earth? No, they are not. Tongues are completely self-created whether speakers are consciously aware of it or not. As such, they are neither supernatural, nor mysterious.