LAST month I was in Accra, Ghana, to learn more about the African version of the new charismatic Christian churches that have become so popular in the United States and are now proliferating in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Ghana and Nigeria. What struck me was how much people spoke in tongues: language-like sounds (usually, repeated phonemes from the speaker’s own language) thought by those who use them to be a language God knows but the speaker does not.

I went to services that lasted three hours and for most of which people prayed in tongues. People I interviewed spoke about praying by themselves in tongues for similar stretches of time. They said they did so because it was the one language the devil could not understand, but what I found so striking was how happy it seemed to make them. “We love to speak in tongues,” one young Ghanaian woman told me with a laugh.

Some of the early Christians spoke in tongues. At least, the Apostle Paul writes about them in his first letter to the Corinthians. Then, for the most part, tongues died out of Christian practice until Pentecostalism emerged around the turn of the 20th century, most famously at a revival in Los Angeles in 1906. “Weird babel of tongues, new sect of fanatics is breaking loose, wild scene last night on Azusa Street, gurgle of wordless talk by a sister,” one newspaper article screamed.

Most tongue speakers talk about tongues as a “gift” from God that can neither be forced nor controlled. Yet the act involves learning and skill. It can also be easily faked. (If you say “I should have bought a Hyundai” 10 times fast, you’ll have done just that, a pastor taught me.)