Tongues Outside of Christianity.
Pagan tongues:
Research
The functionality to generate utterance for tongues is innate to all spirits. Spirits can generate utterance for speech (spiritese) just as the mind can generate utterance for speech (mentalese). This can be seen in the various and sundry examples of tongues existing outside of Christianity and even outside of religion altogether.
The 1972 study by John P. Kildahl The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues concludes that:
...from a linguistic point of view, religiously inspired glossolalic utterances have the same general characteristics as those that are not religiously inspired. In fact, glossolalia is a human phenomenon, not limited to Christianity nor even to religious behavior.
(Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements by Spittler, P. 340).
George Jennings in an article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation expands upon the universality of the experience:
...glossolalia is practiced among the following non-Christian religions of the world; the Peyote cult among the North American Indians, the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, Shamans in the Sudan, the Shango cult of the West Coast of Africa, the Shago cult in Trinidad, the Voodoo cult in Haiti, the Aborigines of South American and Australia, the aboriginal peoples of the subarctic regions of North America and Asia, the Shamans in Greenland, the Dyaks of Borneo, the Zor cult of Ethiopia, the Siberian shamans, the Chaco Indians of South America, the Curanderos of the Andes, the Kinka in the African Sudan, the Thonga shamans of Africa, and the Tibetan monks.
An article in the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation entitled An Ethnological Study of Glossolalia by George J. Jennings, March 1968.
Other studies and sources reach the same conclusions:
Summary of Behavioral Science Research Data on Glossolalia:
1. Glossolalia is an ancient and widespread phenomenon of most societies, occurring most usually in connection with religion.
Behavioral Science Research on the Nature of Glossolalia, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation; September, 1968
There are records of ecstatic speech and the like in Egypt in the eleventh century B.C. In the Hellenistic [Greek] world the prophetess of Delphi and the Sibylline priestess spoke in unknown or unintelligible speech. Moreover, the Dionysianrites contained a trancelike state as well as glossolalia. Many of the magicians and sorcerers of the first century world exhibit similar phenomena.
G.R.Osborne, in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, 1984, page 1100.
Descriptions of ecstatic speech are common in the study of comparative religions.... The Delphic and Pythian religions of Greece understood ecstatic behavior and speech to be evidence of divine inspiration by Apollos.
C.M. Robeck, Jr., in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Vol. 4, 1988, page 872.
Once they began to commune with that deity, they would begin to speak the language of the gods. This was a very common practice in their culture. In fact, the term used in 1 Corinthians to refer to speaking in tongues (glossais lalein) was not invented by Bible writers. It was a term used commonly in the Greco-Roman culture to speak of the pagan language of the gods which occurred while the speaker was in an ecstatic trance. By the way, this language of the gods was always gibberish.
The Truth about Tongues--Part 1 John MacArthur Tape GC 1871
...Glossolalia is a very ancient practice it is still practiced nowadays in many religions, especially those where one seeks contact with the spirit world (witchcraft/shamanism, voodoo) or a union mystical with the All. Mohamed, the founder of Islam, is probably the most famous of those who have practiced glossolalia.
Glossolalia (Tongues) and 1 Corinthians 14
Bruno D. Granger
http://www.apologetique.org/en/rticles/neomontanism/BDG_glossolalia_en.htm
...the significance of the term 'glossolalia', or 'speaking in tongues', comes to the fore. 'The gift of tongues and of their interpretation was not peculiar to the Christian Church, but was a repetition in it of a phrase common in ancient religions. The very phrase glossais lalein, 'to speak with tongues,' was not invented by the New Testament writers, but borrowed from ordinary speech.
Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), s.v, Gift of Tongues, by Fredrick C. Conybeare, 27:10.
Enthusiastic, ecstatic, mystic, possession, trance and other kindred phenomena have long been of interest to anthropologists. Cross-cultural reviews of ethnographic data on glossolalia in particular have been published by L.C. May, Jennings, M. Eliade, among others. The practice was known in ancient India and China, and ethnographies describe glossolalia in almost every area of the world... speaking-in-tongues is widespread and very ancient.
E. Mansell Pattison
Behavioral Science Research On The Nature Of Glossolalia Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, September 1968
Research conducted by Al Carlson at the University of California and Werner Cohn at the University of British Columbia indicate that anyone can produce glossolalic speech which sounded genuine even to believers.
Jimmy Jividen, Glossolalia: from God or man? p 163.
This survey has shown that speaking-in-tongues is widespread and very ancient. Indeed, it is probably that as long as man has had divination, curing, sorcery, and propitiation of spirits, he has had glossolalia ... Whatever the explanation, it is clear that pagans as well as Christians have their glossolalia experiences.
Jimmy Jividen, Glossolalia: from God or man? p 74,75
It should be noted that, while there are Hellenistic parallels for tongues, there is also an OT basis. Thus the seers of 1 Sam. 10:5ff. seem to be robbed of their individuality, and their fervor finds expression in broken cries and unintelligible speech (cf. 2 Kgs. 9:11). Drunkards mock Isaiahs babbling speech (Is. 28:10-11). The later literatare, e.g., Eth. En. 71:11, gives similar examples of ecstatic speech (not necessarily speaking in tongues).
The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume. Kittel, Gerhard, and Friedrich, Gerhard, Editors (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985) Johannes Behm. Unabridged edition of the TDNT, Volume I, page 722.
Glossolalia is an ancient and widespread phenomenon of most societies, occurring most usually in connection with religion.
Behavioral Science Research on the Nature of Glossolalia Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, September, 1968
This may be confusing for believers who hold that only Christians speak in tongues. This perception is arrived at because they conclude the only real manifestation of tongues is that which is enhanced by and precipitated by the Holy Spirit and no real tongues could exist outside of, not only believers, but believers who have experienced the Holy Ghost baptism. These believers correctly judge that tongues outside of the Christian experience are non-Christian tongues, but they are false only insomuch as they do not originate from within the spiritual kingdom of God. Yet they are real tongues according to our wider definition. These are soundings issuing from a spiritual utterance, even if the spirit providing that utterance is unregenerate and of the kingdom of the devil.
The researchers we cited were correct in their observations but were incorrect in their conclusions because they were using the supernatural definition of speaking in tongues. They were attempting to prove these languages were human languages (by their definition i.e. Xenoglossia) and that the source of the speech was the Holy Spirit. To my knowledge no researcher has conducted a study that would seek to prove the theory that speaking in tongues is a universal phenomena experienced by all humans. Most are seeking some evidence for a supernatural element rather than a merely spiritual function. It is unknown whether these researchers consider the human spirit as a valid source of speech. In some cases they may not even consider humans to possess a spirit or that the spiritual even exists.
You cannot do an in-depth study of speaking in languages without first having a basic understanding of linguistics. Linguistics is the science of language. Not languages as in comparative languages. Rather linguistics is the study of the nature and structure of language in general, including topics like phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.
We will look at some of these topics, but we shall see that with regards to tongues some of these are not relevant. A linguist is a scientist who studies language. Linguists represent the science of linguistics as a number of concentric circles. In the centermost circle is phonemes, which describes the smallest elements of language. These smallest elements are called phonemes. You likely learned these phonemes in grade school as the vowels and consonants that make up your native language as well as the sounds associated with them. Any good dictionary has a pronunciation key that will display all the phonemes. For the purpose of this study, we will simply refer to these as the resource from which the sounds of tongues are drawn.