Let’s accept for a moment that Evangelicals speak in real languages when they speak in tongues.
These languages are never existing earthly languages. We never hear Amharic or any other Semitic language. Or Greek. The words are without meaning to us mortals. (Coincidentally, they always sound like the kind of words an English speaker would make up.) It seems to me that the gift of speaking in tongues should always be accompanied by the gift of interpretation, just so everyone can be clued into the breaking news from the Holy Ghost Network. But this never happens.
So why does the Holy Ghost move people in this way? And why is this gift so common relative to the other ones?
That is called glossolalia. It is not, nor is it supposed to be, a real language. The point is to sound impressive, or in some types of religious practice it is a kind of prayer.
Not really answering the question but, I just thought I would note that glossolalia is also a component of voodoo practice and among various traditional South American religions. It was part of ancient Greek/Roman spirituality (e.g. oracles). And it can be found in Buddhist practice, Shinto, and probably any religion with a large enough number of followers.
Stage hypnotists can ask people to make nonsense statements (e.g. invent a language for aliens) and people will do so.
At to the question: No idea. The Oracles had an interpreter. One might take from that, that the ancients had access to the real gods - who could not only cause someone to speak in a tongue but also provide a means of turning that into something useful - whereas modern deities, who are lesser, can only approximate the results and so offer a broken and useless version.
Zeus > Yahweh
That is, of course, presuming that there is a genuine spiritual meaning behind the thing.
Mostly because they have no idea what “speaking in tongues” actually meant in the biblical reference. It wasn’t someone suddenly speaking aloud in a language no one knew, or he never knew. It meant he spoke in his own language, and everyone within earshot heard it in their own language. This is significantly harder to fake, of course. So, Razzledazzleism approximates the miracle by staging an entirely phony, and totally useless stage show. Reformed Razzledazzlists have added an English closing statement including where to join up, pay dues to the church.
Just a data point… When I was in Catholic high school, my freshman religion teacher claimed that he had spoken in tongues in some group setting that included an “interpreter”. The gimmick was that a bunch of seminarians were in a group and were asked to pray in tongues. The seminarians themselves would not understand their own prayers, but the interpreter would translate for them. “You just asked God for… whatever”. This seemed rather inefficient to me, but I guess the idea was that everyone can speak in tongues if they open themselves to the Holy Spirit or some shit, but maybe you need an expert to help out. Anyway, my teacher vaguely described what the interpreter told him his prayer was about. I would think if the Holy Spirit was speaking through you, you’d recall that shit pretty clearly, but my teacher didn’t.
He later went on to become a cop. I guess the Holy Spirit wanted him to write tickets instead of bringing the Word of God to the world.
I heard an account that a Chinese(?) man once went to a church where he heard someone in the congregation (who did not know Cantonese as a learned language) speaking in tongues, which was…Cantonese - and these were words directed at this Chinese man himself.
In high school I fell in with some Pentecostal Catholics who almost had me speaking in tongues. It started as some vocalizations coming from the back of my throat. I stopped it because I could tell I was bullied into it.
Some years later I drove past an Episcopal church advertising a weekly Pentecostal service. I concluded that a Pentecostal Episcopalian would speak with a Mid-Atlantic accent, like Katherine Hepburn.
Ah, in my teens a friend and I went on a quest for religion, I guess you could say. We went around to various churches and sampled their spiritual whatevers. My friend, very oddly, ended up with those Holy Rollers. The glossolalia thing is known as the baptism of the Holy Spirit and it’s considered a sign that you have been touched by the Holy Spirit. So to that end you want it to happen, and you somehow try for it.
Kind of like what you do on a Ouija board IMO.
Anyway that’s where my friend ended up. I ended up in a coven, myself. But not for long. All religions ask something that I cannot do, and that is, believe.
I once went with some friends to their church service. Turned out to be a tiny pentecostal, holy-roller church. Some breakoff branch of Wisconsin Evangelical Lutherans. But part of the ‘service’ involved people speaking in tongues. Chaotic, since they just did it ‘as the spirit moved them’, and often several were speaking out at once. But during this, I heard one young man behind me reciting “sum es est eram eras erat…”. And I vaguely recognized that from long-ago Latin classes – it’s the conjugation of a basic Latin verb “to be”. Something you had to recite & memorize very early in learning Latin.
So not quite the heavenly, not-from-Earth language of ‘speaking in tongues’.
Religious faith is closely akin to hypnosis or self-hypnosis. Speaking in tongues may be evidence that the speaker is properly hypnotized (or hynotizable).
For the record, when people are hypnotized and asked to speak nonsense, if they ever studied a foreign language, they will usually incorporate some of it.
If they have no foreign language history, their glossolalia will use the most common syllables from their native language.
This is kind of a related question. I have seen videos of people going up to the front of one of these churches, getting a touch by the minister, and kind of swooning. It’s expected, there are people there to catch them and lay them down on the floor. Sometimes they twitch. Examples in the movie Marjoe this happened a lot.
What is going on here? Do these people actually pass out? Is this like handshake hypnosis? (And frankly, I have questions about that handshake hypnosis thing, too.)
My spouse and I once went to a church service attended by his best friend from school. I pretty sure it was the friend’s wife who was heavily into the church and the friend went along to keep the wife happy. Mind you, the friend was also definitely a church-going Christian from way back, it’s just that I tlhink the wife chose the actual church they went to.
Anyhow, at a certain point some in the congregation started speaking in tongues. My spouse, very concerned about his non-Christian wife, reassured me it was OK, saying something along the lines of I must not have seen anything like that before. Clearly, he thought it would be out of my experience and possibly frightening.
In a low voice, I said it reminded me of the voodoo ceremonies I’d been to, except a lot more low-key and less chicken blood.
As so often often occurs with me and religion, apparently that was Not The Correct Answer.
Well, by that time at least I was learning discretion - I kept my voice low enough that only my spouse heard me that time.
Glossolalia is more closely associated with charismatic, and not Evangelical, traditions.
In a modern world, it’s much too easy to debunk anyone claiming xenoglossia because you could record them as proof that any claimed natural language is not actually being spoken. Most Pentecostal (and other) charismatic traditions claim a “heavenly” language is being spoken.
When used publicly as part of a gathering, there typically is an interpreter. As a practical matter, this kind of keeps the tongue-speaker in line, in my opinion.
But the point of speaking in tongues is to demonstrate that the speaker is in contact with God. It’s not so much the content of the message. When public, that message is entirely within the hands of the interpreter and not the tongue-speaker; when private, no content is necessary–just the feeling of being in touch with God.
A related topic is the entranced Greek prophetesses, e.g. at the Temple in Delphi. In some accounts they spoke nonsense “in tongues” and the gibberish was interpreted by priests. In other accounts their words were clever but in a tone alien to the prophetess, who remembered nothing when awoken.