GLOSSOLALIA

GLOSSOLALIA (from the Greek glōssa, "tongue, language," and lalein, "to talk") is a nonordinary speech behavior that is institutionalized as a religious ritual in numerous Western and non-Western religious communities. Its worldwide distribution attests to its antiquity, as does its mention in ancient documents. It is alluded to in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament, as in the well-known narration in the Acts of the Apostles about events on the Day of the Pentecost. There are references to it in the Vedas (c. 1000 bce), in Patañjali's Yoga Sutras, and in Tibetan Tantric writings. Traces of it can be found in the litanies (dhikr s) of some orders of the Islamic Sufi mystics.

Early ethnographic reports of glossolalia treated it with contempt, calling it "absurd nonsense, gibberish scarce worth recording," while Christian theologians tended to think of it as an exclusively Christian phenomenon, peculiar, according to some, to apostolic times. Modern-day forms of glossolalia were classed as abnormal psychological occurrences, possible evidence of schizophrenia or hysteria, because researchers observed it only in mental patients. The situation started to change when, as the result of interest renewed by the upsurge of the Pentecostal movement, field-workers began to examine glossolalia as a part of religious ritual.

In an article published in 1969, for instance, Virginia H. Hine reported on a comparative anthropological investigation of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, Mexico, Haiti, and Colombia, combining the use of questionnaires, interviews, and participant observation (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8: 212–226). Her functional analysis showed glossolalia to be a component in the process of commitment to a movement, with implications for both personal and social change. This conclusion agrees in substance with numerous ethnographic reports from non-Western societies, where glossolalia often appears before or during the initiation of religious practitioners.

A few years before Hine's study, the pathology model of glossolalia was refuted by L. M. Vivier-van Etveldt (M. D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1960). He tested two carefully matched groups, one made up of members of a church that practiced glossolalia and the other made up of members of a traditional orthodox reformed church where such behavior was not accepted. A number of psychological tests, such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and the Personality Factor Test developed by James Cattell, indicated no inherent weakness in the neural organization of the glossolalists. On the contrary, they appeared to be less subject to suggestion and better adjusted than their conservative counterparts. By implication, this finding should put to rest the numerous allegations that shamans, who frequently utter glossolalia, are psychotic. The salient difference between a religious practitioner and a mental patient lies in the fact that the latter is unable to control his behavior ritually.

As to formal properties, glossolalia is a nonordinary speech event in the sense that it consists of nonsense syllables. In contrast with natural languages, its syllables and segments are not words; that is, they do not exhibit the attribution of meaning, and they are not strung together according to rules of grammar. For this reason, linguists reject the interpretation of glossolalia as xenoglossia (from the Greek xenox, "stranger," and glōssa, "language"), which claims that glossolalia is some foreign language that could be understood by another person who spoke it. William J. Samarin, a linguist working with English-speaking Christian groups, regards glossolalia instead as a type of pseudolanguage. In his 1972 article "Variation and Variables in Religious Glossolalia" (Language in Society 1: 121–130), he defines it as "unintelligible post-babbling speech that exhibits superficial phonological similarity to language without having consistent syntagmatic structure and that is not systematically derived from or related to known languages." He notes that glossolalia is repetitious and can be subdivided into macrosegments, which are comparable to sentences; microsegments, which are reminiscent of words; and sounds. There is also a pattern of stress and pitch. According to Samarin, speakers of English have an "English accent" in glossolalia; that is, their sounds are English speech sounds. He attributes these regularities to a particular style of discourse that practitioners assume by imitating certain preaching styles.

This writer's own fieldwork and laboratory research have led to somewhat different conclusions. As a psychological anthropologist and linguist, the author of this article conducted participant observation in various English-, Spanish-, and Maya-speaking Pentecostal communities in the United States and Mexico as well as with the founder of a new religion in Japan. In addition, tape recordings of non-Christian rituals from Africa, Borneo, Indonesia, and Japan were compared. The results indicated that when all features of glossolalia were taken into consideration—that is, its segmental structure (such as sounds, syllables, and phrases) and its suprasegmental elements (namely, rhythm, accent, and especially overall intonation)—they seemed cross-linguistically and cross-culturally identical. Laboratory tracings that used a level recorder, which registers changes in pressure density (in this case, intonation), confirmed these impressions at least in the case of intonation. This method is also suitable for distinguishing glossolalia from such other nonordinary speech events as sleep talking and talking during hypnotic regression (see this writer's 1981 article "States of Consciousness: A Study of Soundtracks," Journal of Mind and Behavior 2: 209–219). The latter finding is important, because many ethnographic observers consider the behavior of which glossolalia is a part to be hypnotically induced, which in view of these results is in error.

Self-reporting by ethnographic consultants and observation of their behavior indicate the presence of a changed state of consciousness during glossolalia, ranging from minimal to quite intense. This author therefore attributes the cross-cultural agreements in the features of glossolalia to these neurophysiological changes, collectively and popularly called trance, and defines glossolalia as a vocalization pattern, a speech automatism that is produced in the substratum of the trance and that reflects directly, in its segmental and suprasegmental structures, the neurophysiological processes present in this changed state of consciousness.

Put more simply, whatever takes place in the nervous system during a trance causes utterance to break down into phrases of equal length, provided the pauses are also included. That is, using a concept taken from music rather than linguistics, it causes the phrases to be divided into bars, each of which is accented on the first syllable, and it causes the bars to pulsate, to throb rhythmically in a sequence of consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel. And it is this writer's belief that the trance state is responsible for the haunting intonation of glossolalia; never varying, it rises to a peak at the end of the first third of the unit utterance and drops to a level much lower than that at the onset as it comes to a close.

The sounds of glossolalia do not necessarily reflect the inventory of the speaker's language, for they frequently include phones not found in a speaker's native tongue. English speakers, for instance, often use /a/ as a high central, unrounded vowel, the so-called continental sound, which does not occur in English, and Spanish speakers in Mexico may use /ö/ (the long, closed o, as in the German word Öse ), which is not a Spanish vowel. In addition, shrieks as well as barking, whistling, grunting, growling, and many other so-called animal sounds have also been reported.

Although glossolalia is often described as a spontaneous outburst, it is, actually, a learned behavior, learned either unawarely or, sometimes, consciously. The fact that individual congregations with a stable membership tend to develop their own characteristic glossolalia "dialect" indicates that learning has occurred, and the many traditional forms in which glossolalia appears in non-Western societies are obviously taught. These include such conventions as speaking individually, in groups, and in the form of a dialogue, often heard in the Japanese new religions, and singing.

As the foregoing characterization of glossolalia indicates, one probably needs to view trance as the primary behavior, on which vocalization is superimposed and into which the practitioner switches with the help of a large variety of stimuli, such as singing, dancing, clapping, and drumming. Present research suggests that this trance—a frenzy, rapture, ecstasy, or, in more neutral terms, an altered state of consciousness—involves a single, generalized neurophysiological process. Barbara W. Lex, a medical anthropologist, holds that what is involved is an alternation between two different arousals of the nervous system. This tunes the nervous system and releases tension, thus accounting for the beneficial effects of the experience. Observations of Christian and non-Western religious communities alike indicate that apparently anybody with a normal physical endowment is able to initiate this process and to switch into a trance. Differences in personality, treated extensively by early researchers, apparently do not enter into the picture.

An association between trance and glossolalia is now accepted by many researchers as a correct assumption (see, for instance, Williams, 1981). Thus, if one recognizes trance as the primary, generating process of the features of glossolalia, one could then conclude that a vocalization consisting only of nonsense syllables, no matter how varied, may in fact represent a cultural convention and that other types of speech could also be uttered while the practitioner is in a trance, with the trance, of course, still expressing itself in some form or other. Field observation shows that this is indeed true. Nonsense syllables may occur in combination with words from the vernacular and/or a foreign language—such as "Come, Jesus" and "Hallelujah," which are often heard from American Pentecostals—without disturbing the accent pattern or intonation of the utterance, its trance features. In the circumpolar region, many shamans, among the Inuit (Eskimo), the Saami (Lapps), Chukchi, the Khanty (Ostiaks), the Yakuts, and the Evenki, use in their religious rituals secret languages that consist of a mixture of nonsense syllables and the vernacular. Just like a natural language, these secret trance dialects are taught by the master shamans to their neophytes.

From Africa, there are reports of a secret religious trance language used exclusively by women. Bakweri women living on the slopes of Mount Cameroon speak a "mermaid language" in ritual context, which is taught to adolescent girls when they are ready for initiation. A girl's readiness is indicated by her "fainting," that is, experiencing a trance, and by her ability, while in this altered state of consciousness, to understand some of the mermaid language as it is spoken to her by a mature woman. No details of this language are known outside the tribe, for the male ethnographer was barred from learning it. (See Edwin Ardener, "Belief and the Problem of Women," in The Interpretation of Ritual, edited by J. S. La Fontaine, London, 1972, pp. 135–201.) It is probably a mixed form, for he mentions that scraps of the mermaid language are common currency even among Christian, educated, urban Bakweri women. This suggests that these "scraps" may have turned into words or that they were not originally nonsense syllables but had specific, assigned meanings.

When speaking in a trance, a practitioner may use no nonsense syllables at all, employing instead only the vernacular. If the principal pronouncement is in nonsense syllables, however, as, for instance, among Christians speaking in tongues or among the nomadic, reindeer-hunting Chukchi of Siberia, an "interpretation" may be provided. Such interpretations exhibit a distinct, trance-based rhythm and an intonation whose exactness cannot be reproduced in the ordinary state of consciousness. This is the same phenomenon exhibited in the many forms of "inspired," prophetic speeches, heard around the world, in which a scanning rhythm imparts a poetic quality to the utterance. In such speeches words are sometimes truncated, and rules of grammar violated, overridden by the exigencies of the trance. Even communicative intent may have to be altered. Thus the demons who spoke through the trance of a German university student, Anneliese Michel, could ask no questions because in spoken German the tone of an interrogative must rise at the end, while all trance utterances have a pronounced drop. (See this author's book about this case, The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel, New York, 1981.)

The case of Anneliese Michel brings up the question of what kinds of religious experience are commonly expressed by glossolalia. In her case, the experience was that of possession, and glossolalia was the voice, the "language," of the demons that she reported were possessing her. Possession is one of the most frequent ritual occasions for the use of glossolalia. In possession, an entity from the sacred dimension of reality is experienced as penetrating the respective person. In Christian contexts, the entity is most usually the Holy Spirit, and glossolalia is then felt to be its language. The Holy Spirit is experienced as power, not as personality, but other spirits—for instance, those of the dead of the Trobriand Islanders, ancestral spirits in Africa, and various spirits in Haitian vodou—have pronounced personality traits that are expressed in glossolalia. Western observers of possession may speak of role playing, but the experience is more that of being in the presence of a discrete being. The voice of the possessing being differs from that of the possessed practitioner. Anneliese Michel's demons spoke with a deep, raspy, male voice, and each one—there were six all told—exhibited distinct characteristics; Judas was brutal, for instance, and Nero effeminate. In vodou, female mediums are often possessed by male lwa (spirits), in which case a similar change in voice and, of course, in comportment takes place. In Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian healing cult, possession by the child spirit will bring about an equally dramatic voice modification. Siberian shamans may be possessed by helpers in the form of animal spirits, and their speech then consists of animal voices, or "animal language." A similar change in language takes place when the shaman turns into an animal, which is a different experience, however.

According to a generally held belief, illness will result if a noxious being of the sacred dimension of reality possesses a person. Therefore, the harmful entity needs to be expelled, or exorcised. The method by which this is done depends on the tradition prevailing in the religious community in question. The ritual specialist carrying out the exorcism may merely recite a required formula while remaining in the ordinary state of consciousness—as was done for Anneliese Michel by a Catholic priest who spoke the exorcistic prayers from the Rituale romanum —or he may enter a trance and utter glossolalia, usually a mixed version, which is thought to influence the actions of demons. This happens in Tantric exorcistic rituals in Tibet, for instance, and during healing sessions among Buddhists of northern Thailand.

Communication by glossolalia is instituted not only with unfriendly beings, of course. On a tape recording made in Borneo a female healer can be heard calling her helping spirit. In the zār cult of Ethiopia, the shamans talk to the zār s (spirits) in a "secret language." The shamans of the Semai of Malaysia use glossolalia to invite the "nephews of the gods" to a feast, and the Yanomamö Indians of Amazonia chant while in trance to their hekura demons, calling them to come live in their chests.

Quite generally, glossolalia cannot be considered a symbol. Rather, it is a medium of communication that directly informs both the participants and the onlookers of a ritual about the presence of and contact with the powers or the beings of the sacred dimension of reality—about the Holy Spirit who is baptizing a convert, perhaps, or about the appearance of any one of the multitude of entities that inhabit sacred realms.

See Also

Chanting; Enthusiasm; Frenzy; Language, article on Sacred Language; Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity; Spirit Possession.

Bibliography

Three books, published simultaneously in 1972, discuss glossolalia from different angles. My own work, Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (Chicago, 1972), provides a linguistic analysis of glossolalia and a descriptive study of the entire behavior; John P. Kildahl, in The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (New York, 1972), takes up the relationship between personality variables and the practice of glossolalia; and William J. Samarin, in Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (New York, 1972), seeks to answer the question of why people speak in tongues by placing the behavior in social context. A comprehensive review of the research into glossolalia ten years later, including references to non-Western material, can be found in Cyril G. Williams's Tongues of the Spirit: A Study of Pentecostal Glossolalia and Related Phenomena (Cardiff, 1981). An anthology edited by Irving I. Zaretzky and Mark P. Leone, Religious Movements in Contemporary America (Princeton, N.J., 1974), gives a panoramic view of the multitude of religious movements in the United States, many of which use glossolalia. For a good description of glossolalia in a non-Western society, see Arkadii Federovich Anisimov's "The Shaman's Tent of the Evenks and the Origin of the Shamanistic Rite," translated from Russian by Dr. and Mrs. Stephen P. Dunn, in Studies in Siberian Shamanism, edited by Henry N. Michael (Toronto, 1963).

New Sources

Holm, Nils G. "Ecstasy Research in the 20th century. An Introduction." In Religious Ecstasy, edited by Nils G. Holm, pp. 7–26. Stockholm, 1982.

Holm, Nils G. "Glossolalia as a Transition Rite." In Transition Rites: Cosmic, Social and Individual Order, edited by Ugo Bianchi, pp. 143–149. Rome, 1986. The theoretical conclusions of this essay and the preceding one are based on research on glossolalia within the Swedish-speaking Pentecostal movement in Finland.

Hutch, R. A. "The Personal Ritual of Glossolalia." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 19 (1980).

Williams, Cyril G. "Glossolalia." In Concise Encyclopedia of Language and Religion, edited by John F. A. Sawyer and J. M. Y. Simpson, pp. 249–250. Amsterdam, 2001.

Felicitas D. Goodman (1987)

Revised Bibliography