Quote on tongues

Cross-cultural investigations have shown that a glossolalic utterance is drawn from the basic sounds of phonemes of a speaker’s native language. Those phonemes erupt, not at random, but in patterns that resemble the phonological patterns of that language … Unlike all known languages, living or dead, glossolalia has no grammar. Nor does it have any semantic value, because the “words” are unrelated to the stock of public meanings within the speech community (although they may have a private meaning for the speaker, or a purely connotative meaning for the hearer)

— Grant Wacker, “Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism,” in Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 211