Part 7 – General James Green
FRIENDS, we would be in trouble—real bad trouble—if all we had about tongues came from these anti-Pentecostals and anti-Charismatics. But, even some from their camp have been baptized in the Holy Ghost and received the gift of tongues…Praise The Lord!
Tongues is not “babble” or “prattle” or other such names given it. Glossolalia in Contemporary Linguistic Study—the highly respected (by tongues’ critics) 1972 study of John P. Kildahl (the Psychology of Speaking in Tongues)—concludes that “…from a linguistic point of view, religiously inspired glossolalia utterances have the same general characteristics as those that are not religiously inspired.” Thank you Dr. Kildahl for YOUR comment! Others echo him in declaring that tongues is a “human phenomenon, not limited to Christianity nor even to religious behaviour.” (“Dict. of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements” by Spittler p. 340).
There is no doubt that there are false tongues. I’m sure the witch of Endor (1 Sam. 28:7) spoke in demonic tongues. Isaiah 8:19 speaks about those who had familiar spirits (demons!), and about wizards that “peep” and “mutter.”
“Experts in the field of linguistics have diligently studied the phenomenon of glossolalia over a period of many years. One of the early investigations was made in the early 1960’s by Eugene A. Nida. He provided a detailed list of reasons why glossolalia cannot be human language.” Another early study, done by W. A. Wolfram in the year 1966, concluded that “glossolalia lacks the basic elements of human language as a system of coherent communication” (Erick Franke, Speaking in Tongues, “Christian News,” Feb. 2005, pg. 25).
Franke relates to his readers how Professor W. J. Samarin of the Univ. Of Toronto’s Dept. of Linguistics published, after a decade of careful research, rejected the view that glossolalia is xenoglossia, i.e. some foreign language that could be understood by another person who knows that language. Conclusion? Glossolalia is a “psuedo-language.” He defined glossolalia as “unintelligible, babbling speech that exhibits superficial phonological similarity to language, without having consistent systematic structure” and “not systematically derived from or related to known language.” (W. J. Samarin, “Variation and Variables in Religious Glossolalia,” Language in Society, ed. Dell Haymes, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972, pgs. 121-130). More about this ‘unknown’ language in a later study.