glossolalia

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the production of speech-like sounds that do not correspond to any known language, practised particularly in Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions as a spiritual gift known as speaking in tongues, and studied linguistically as a form of human vocal behaviour; glossolalia syllable sequences tend to draw on the phonological inventory of the speaker's native language, producing speech that sounds foreign to naive listeners but bears the acoustic signature of the speaker's linguistic background — a finding that has been used to argue against claims that the phenomenon involves genuine unknown languages; in religious contexts glossolalia is understood as direct communication with or by the divine, requiring interpretation by another spiritually gifted person; psychologically it has been associated with altered states of consciousness, heightened emotional states, and trance-like dissociation; it is distinguished from xenoglossy by the absence of any claim to produce an identifiable human language