STORY OF THE WEEK: Speaking in Tongues Explained: Miracle, Mind Trick, or Mystery?

A Deeper Dive Into One of Christianity’s Strangest Practices

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When my mate Stephen began to speak Italian, it really caught me by surprise. That’s because without ever learning it, he just opened up his mouth one day and started to speak it.

Fluently.

Not as one learning a language for the first time but as one to whom the language was already known. The thing is, Stephen was just an Aussie kid like me who suffered the curse of monolingualism, the same as many Aussie kids. He spoke English. Just English.

And yet that night at a Christian youth camp back when I was in my teens, he began to speak Italian — without ever learning it. It was during a prayer meeting that had become particularly impassioned. We were just a bunch of kids who wanted to experience God, and so we gathered in a room after dark when we were supposed to be asleep, and we prayed. We prayed with all our might.

All of a sudden, Stephen began to pray out loud in a different language. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it, but when another kid in the room of European descent was able to translate it for the rest of us, it all seemed pretty real.

Oh, I can already hear the shuffling of feet as the skeptics line up to slam this story as imagined. I can hear them telling me that the kid who translated the whole thing could have said anything, and we wouldn’t have known any different. I can hear them tell me about my confirmation bias wanting this experience to be true. But, the fact of the matter is that, up until that point in my life, I had never heard of “Speaking in Tongues,” apart from a few vague references to it when we learned about Acts 2 during Sunday School lessons.

Of course, what happened in Acts 2 was taught in Sunday School as something that happened back then that didn’t or probably couldn’t happen anymore. And yet, here I was, listening to another person speak in a language they have never learned, seemingly enabled by a third party.

It was… well, it was weird.

What is Speaking in Tongues?

Speaking or praying in tongues is a religious practice performed by charismatic Christians where they spontaneously vocalize their speaking or praying in a language that is neither their own, nor one that they have learned. It usually sounds like gibberish for those on the outside listening in, but those who believe in the practice swear that it can be a deeply spiritual and even life-changing experience. If you’ve never seen it or heard it, here’s a little YouTube video of a preacher named Paula White, who also happened to be the chair of the evangelical advisory board during Donald Trump’s first administration. Tongues start at the 22-second mark. Enjoy!

Weirded out yet?

The Science of Speaking in Tongues

So what is actually going on here? The scientific term used to describe speaking in tongues is the word “Glossolalia.” Dr. Heather Kavan of Massey University sat through over five hundred hours of fieldwork in Pentecostal and Charismatic meetings, observing and recording the practice of speaking in tongues. She concluded that “glossolalia is characterized by high incidences of repetition, alliteration, and assonance. Strings of syllables made up of sounds taken from those that the speaker knows, are put together more or less haphazardly but still emerging as word-like and sentence-like units. The rhythm of glossolalia is highly regular, repetitive, and often staccato compared with everyday speech.”

What is more, tongues are most often made up of words, blends, and sounds that people already know from their own native language.

Interestingly, Dr. Andrew Newberg and neuroscientific researchers from the University of Pennsylvania ran CT scans on people’s brains and found that when those people spoke in tongues, the part of their brain responsible for producing language saw a decrease in activity. Newberg explains it like this: “Their lips were moving, the sound was being generated, but the actual language centers of the brain were not as active as usual. It’s like the car was running with no one in the driver’s seat.”