Speaking in Tongues: The Spiritual and Psychological Roots of Bilingual Identity

Every Sunday morning, an odd and subtly fascinating event takes place at a small Pentecostal church on Johannesburg’s south side. The members of the congregation arrive speaking Zulu, Sotho, and a little English—the common tongues used in their daily lives, at work, and during disagreements with neighbors. Then the service starts, and at some point during the worship, the room is filled with a different sound. syllables without a known map. voices that seem to be aiming for something that is slightly beyond the rules of everyday existence.

Sitting in such a location makes it difficult to ignore how the space shifts. The stance shifts. The faces shift. Speaking in tongues, or “glossolalia” as academics refer to it, seems to pull people out of one identity and place them inside another, even if only for an hour.

Early in the 1970s, linguist William Samarin recorded glossolalia in Jamaica, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US for five years. He heard about Russian Molokans who had settled in Los Angeles, snake handlers in the Appalachian hills, and Puerto Rican communities in the Bronx. He discovered something truly strange: the speech had real pauses, real rhythms, and real intonation—all the outward manifestations of human language—but no real meaning. No concept was mentioned by any word. No thought was structured by a sentence. To put it bluntly, he described it as “a facade of language.” Linguistically empty, spiritually charged, and phonologically structured.

Although that conclusion seems contemptuous, it most likely misses the mark. because the speakers weren’t attempting to convey any information. They were attempting to change who they were, or perhaps more accurately, to gain access to a self they thought already existed somewhere beneath or beyond their typical identity.

Psychological anthropologist Felicitas Goodman went one step further. She discovered that glossolalia was influenced by the speaker’s own native language patterns rather than being random noise. A Mayan speaker’s glossolalia had a very different rhythm than that of an English speaker. It seems that the unconscious self seeps through. Glossolalia may psychologically create a sort of liminal persona that is neither fully the ordinary speaker nor fully a divine instrument, but rather something in between.

This has a social component that merits greater consideration than it typically receives. One of the most effective tools available to humans for determining who belongs and who doesn’t is language. A common dialect indicates a common ancestry and a common allegiance. In addition to having a spiritual experience, a congregation that engages in glossolalia together is strengthening a shared identity that distinguishes them from the outside world. Speaking in tongues is how some communities claim to be a heavenly people rather than an earthly one, according to the almost elegant hypothesis examined in migration theory. The identity shift is indicated by the language shift.

Glossolalia has occasionally been framed by clinical psychology as a symptom of stress, political unrest, or economic disruption. It’s an alluring argument. It is true that many of the communities where glossolalia flourishes are under stress. However, there is scant evidence of a psychological disorder. By quantifiable standards, people who speak in tongues are not more mentally unstable than anyone else. If anything, the practice appears to provide relief, coherence, and a feeling of being a part of something greater than oneself.

Whether the bilingual identity produced by glossolalia—the spiritual self versus the social self—is a means of expansion or escape is still up for debate. Both could be the case. There is a sense that the human need to communicate beyond simple language is deeper than any one psychology and older than any religion when one observes this happening across cultures and continents. The tongue extends. The self comes next.