Speaking in tongues (glossolalia)

Speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, is the practice, central to Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, of vocalising fluent speech-like sounds that the speaker does not understand and believes to be prompted by the Holy Spirit. It is understood by practitioners as a spiritual gift described in the New Testament: the Book of Acts records the disciples at Pentecost speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance, and the Apostle Paul discusses the gift at length among the charisms given to the church, treating it as a form of prayer and praise addressed to God that edifies the speaker, and directing that in public worship it be exercised in order and accompanied by interpretation. For Pentecostals the experience is often linked to the "baptism in the Holy Spirit," a distinct empowering subsequent to conversion, of which tongues may be the sign.

The practice, largely dormant in mainstream Christianity for centuries, re-emerged with great force in the Pentecostal revival at the start of the twentieth century and spread through the Charismatic movement into many denominations, becoming one of the most recognisable features of a now vast global Christian current. It has been studied by linguists and psychologists, who generally find glossolalia to be not a natural human language but a patterned vocalisation, and who have examined it as a phenomenon of religious experience without settling the theological question of its source. Within Christianity it remains variously esteemed and disputed, prized by Pentecostals and Charismatics as a living gift of the Spirit, regarded by others as having ceased with the apostolic age or as requiring careful discernment, and it marks one of the clearest dividing lines in contemporary Protestant practice.

The modern Pentecostal movement traces its founding to a set of meetings that began in April 1906 at a former livery stable on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, led by William J. Seymour, an African American preacher who had studied under Charles Parham in Kansas. Seymour taught that speaking in tongues was the evidence that a believer had received the baptism in the Holy Spirit, a teaching Parham had already advanced, and the Azusa Street meetings ran nightly for roughly three years, drawing a racially mixed congregation that was itself remarkable in the segregated United States of the period, and reported by observers to include people speaking in tongues, falling to the floor and prophesying.

Visitors carried the practice home and planted it across denominations that became the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ and dozens of smaller bodies, so that a single storefront revival is treated by historians as the direct root of a movement now counted in several hundred million adherents worldwide. The doctrine that tongues is the initial evidence of Spirit baptism became a dividing line almost immediately: classical Pentecostal bodies held to it as required, while the charismatic movement that spread through mainline Protestant and Catholic churches from the 1960s onward generally received the gift without adopting the evidential doctrine attached to it at Azusa Street. The distinction still separates Pentecostal denominations from the wider charismatic renewal that followed them by half a century.