Glossolalia

Glossolalia is spontaneous sustained human speech that has no complex meaning. Many people associate glossolalia with religious rituals, and particularly with Christian fundamentalists who call it 'speaking in tongues'. However, glossolalia is spoken in many countries by people from many different religions; in fact, some atheists speak it for relaxation, and is used by some actors in theatrical preparation exercises.

Glossolalia has been studied by few people. However, it could be very important for the study of human language. So far, my research suggests that glossolalia has no lexicon (i.e. no words/morphemes), and by this no syntax, morphology, or semantics. It is essentially 'pure' phonology and phonetics. It therefore offers the potential to see phonological mechanisms without the interference of morphological and syntactic restrictions.

The first stage of my research into glossolalia is over: I have collected 19 hours of recordings from a diverse array of speakers.

The second stage is to transcribe the glossolalia and create a searchable database. I am in the process of doing so. However, this stage takes an incredibly long time. I have had 19 transcribers work for me; the database is about 30% complete.

I plan to release the glossolalia corpuse in a substantially complete by the end of Fall 2010. After then, work will continue to complete the corpus.

The third stage is to determine how glossolalia is generated. Without enough data, any speculation about glossolalia's precise linguistic properties is premature.