Xenoglossy
Encyclopedia
Xenoglossy also written xenoglossia (z or z), is the putative paranormal
phenomenon in which a person is able to speak or write a language he or she supposedly could not have acquired by natural means. For example, a person who speaks German
fluently, but who is not a native German speaker, has never studied German, never been to a German-speaking country, and never associated with German speakers or had any other source of exposure to the German language, would be said to exhibit xenoglossy. The existence of xenoglossy is not generally accepted by linguists and psychologists (Samarin 1976, Thomason 1984, 1987, 1996). However, psychiatrist and paranormal
researcher Ian Stevenson
documented several cases that he considered authentic (Stevenson, 2001). The words derive from Greek
ξένος (xenos), "foreigner" and γλῶσσα (glōssa), "tongue" or "language".
claims that xenoglossy took place at Pentecost
. The Book of Acts (2:1-13) describes Galileans speaking in non-native languages drawn from all over the Roman Empire, so that visitors to Jerusalem could understand them declaring "the mighty works of God". The visitors included Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia
, Judaea, Cappadocia
, Pontus
, Asia
, Phrygia
, Pamphylia
, Egypt
, Cyrenian Libya
, and Rome
. The author of the Book of Acts calls this phenomenon "speaking in tongues", and other instances of it are mentioned in Acts 10:46; 19:6 and 1 Corinthians
(12-14).
, a parapsychologist and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, claimed there were just a handful of suggestive cases. These included two hypnotic regression cases where the subject could converse with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. Sarah Thomason
, a linguist at the University of Michigan, reanalysed these cases.
, England
began to speak in an ancient Egyptian
dialect. She claimed to be under the influence of the personality of Babylonian princess and Pharaoh Amenhotep III's wife Telika-Ventiu, who supposedly lived about 3300 years ago. Rosemary stated that she "hears" the Egyptian words clairaudiently
and repeated them aloud. During more than a thousand language tests, the girl had spoken some 5000 phrases and short sentences in the old Egyptian language. They were recorded phonetically and the first 800 of them were later identified and translated by an Egyptologist Mr. Hulme. He claimed that Rosemary's speech substantially and consistently conformed to what Egyptologists know today of the ancient Egyptian tongue. Three books on the Rosemary case have been published and two gramophone discs of xenoglossy have been recorded. Wood claimed that Rosemary was never tested by independent witnesses and the claims were not submitted to independent scholarly inquiry.
However, in the June, 1937, issue of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
, Battiscombe Gunn
claimed that Hulme had manipulated the transcriptions to fit his own expectations of what he imagined ancient Egyptian to sound like. A later examination by John D. Ray
(the current Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology
at the University of Cambridge
) confirmed "there could be no mistaking Hulme's incompetence". Furthermore, both Ray and Gunn pointed out that Rosemary's visions of camels as domestic transport were inconsistent, as camels were not used for transport in 18th Dynasty Egypt.
from Pilsen, who, in September 2007 at the age of 18 reportedly awoke after a crash and was able to converse in perfect English. His ability did not last long and he was unable to remember anything from this episode. The press reports of his fluency in English are based entirely on the reports of his Czech team-mates. There is no record of his allegedly fluent speech or report by a skilled English speaker.
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
phenomenon in which a person is able to speak or write a language he or she supposedly could not have acquired by natural means. For example, a person who speaks German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
fluently, but who is not a native German speaker, has never studied German, never been to a German-speaking country, and never associated with German speakers or had any other source of exposure to the German language, would be said to exhibit xenoglossy. The existence of xenoglossy is not generally accepted by linguists and psychologists (Samarin 1976, Thomason 1984, 1987, 1996). However, psychiatrist and paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
researcher Ian Stevenson
Ian Stevenson
Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates the paranormal.Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation might...
documented several cases that he considered authentic (Stevenson, 2001). The words derive from Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
ξένος (xenos), "foreigner" and γλῶσσα (glōssa), "tongue" or "language".
In Christianity
The New TestamentNew Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
claims that xenoglossy took place at Pentecost
Pentecost
Pentecost is a prominent feast in the calendar of Ancient Israel celebrating the giving of the Law on Sinai, and also later in the Christian liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection of Jesus...
. The Book of Acts (2:1-13) describes Galileans speaking in non-native languages drawn from all over the Roman Empire, so that visitors to Jerusalem could understand them declaring "the mighty works of God". The visitors included Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
, Judaea, Cappadocia
Cappadocia
Cappadocia is a historical region in Central Anatolia, largely in Nevşehir Province.In the time of Herodotus, the Cappadocians were reported as occupying the whole region from Mount Taurus to the vicinity of the Euxine...
, Pontus
Pontus
Pontus or Pontos is a historical Greek designation for a region on the southern coast of the Black Sea, located in modern-day northeastern Turkey. The name was applied to the coastal region in antiquity by the Greeks who colonized the area, and derived from the Greek name of the Black Sea: Πόντος...
, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
, Phrygia
Phrygia
In antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of Anatolia, in what is now modern-day Turkey. The Phrygians initially lived in the southern Balkans; according to Herodotus, under the name of Bryges , changing it to Phruges after their final migration to Anatolia, via the...
, Pamphylia
Pamphylia
In ancient geography, Pamphylia was the region in the south of Asia Minor, between Lycia and Cilicia, extending from the Mediterranean to Mount Taurus . It was bounded on the north by Pisidia and was therefore a country of small extent, having a coast-line of only about 75 miles with a breadth of...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, Cyrenian Libya
Libya
Libya is an African country in the Maghreb region of North Africa bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Sudan to the southeast, Chad and Niger to the south, and Algeria and Tunisia to the west....
, and Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. The author of the Book of Acts calls this phenomenon "speaking in tongues", and other instances of it are mentioned in Acts 10:46; 19:6 and 1 Corinthians
First Epistle to the Corinthians
The first epistle of Paul the apostle to the Corinthians, often referred to as First Corinthians , is the seventh book of the New Testament of the Bible...
(12-14).
Cases subjected to scientific investigation
Scientific research into xenoglossy is quite rare. Ian StevensonIan Stevenson
Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates the paranormal.Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation might...
, a parapsychologist and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, claimed there were just a handful of suggestive cases. These included two hypnotic regression cases where the subject could converse with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. Sarah Thomason
Sarah Thomason
Sarah Grey Thomason is a linguist known particularly for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, typological universals, and xenoglossy. She has also worked since 1981 documenting Montana Salish. She is one of the Language Log...
, a linguist at the University of Michigan, reanalysed these cases.
- Swarnlatta Mishra
- A girl in India who lived entirely among Hindi-speaking people but was able to sing songs in Bengali, as identified by Professor P. Pal of Itachuna College in West BengalWest BengalWest Bengal is a state in the eastern region of India and is the nation's fourth-most populous. It is also the seventh-most populous sub-national entity in the world, with over 91 million inhabitants. A major agricultural producer, West Bengal is the sixth-largest contributor to India's GDP...
, who studied the case after Professor Stevenson and transcribed some of the songs.- Sharada
- Uttara Huddar was a woman in India who normally spoke MarathiMarathi languageMarathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...
. While in the hospital undergoing psychiatric treatment, she began manifesting a personality called Sharada, who spoke in Bengali. Stevenson had recordings analysed by Bengali speakers, who disagreed among themselves about the subject's fluency. It cannot be ruled out that the subject may have learned Bengali earlier in life: both she and her father had a long-standing interest in Bengal, her home city had 1% native Bengali speakers, she had read Bengali novels in translation, and she herself had taken lessons in reading Bengali.- Jensen
- an American woman who presented the character of a Swedish farmer while under hypnosis conducted by her physician husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in Swedish, albeit not fluently. However Thomason's reanalysis concluded that Jensen could not convincingly be claimed to speak Swedish; in the interview Stevenson studied in depth, though Jensen had a total vocabulary of about 100 words, only about 60 were used before interlocutors used them, and, as one of Stevenson's consultants pointed out, this reduced to 31 after eliminating cognates. Jensen also gave no complex sentences, mostly gave one or two word answers, and - as acknowledged by Stevenson - the subject's poor pronunciation was covered by correct spelling in the transcripts. Thomason mentions, however, that two of Stevenson's consultants praised Jensen's Swedish accent, and one claimed that only a native speaker could pronounce the word 'seven' correctly as Jensen does. Furthermore, she says that Stevenson's efforts to rule out fraud are convincing. Jensen's lack of understanding of Swedish was such that he answers ‘my wife’ to a question about what he would pay for some item at the market. Linguist William Samarin drew the same conclusion as Thomason.
- Gretchen
- an American woman named Dolores Jay who presented the life of a teenage girl in Germany while hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in German. Mrs. Jay did study a German dictionary at one point during the sessions, but Stevenson pointed out that she had already spontaneously produced 206 words before this event. Again Thomason's reanalysis, while acknowledging that the evidence against fraud was convincing, concluded that Gretchen could not converse in German. Her speech was largely the repetition of German questions with different intonation, or utterances of one or two words. Her "German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty". When asked what she had for breakfast, she answers ‘Bettzimmer’, which is a non-existent word made up of the two words for 'bed' and 'room'. Moreover she had some previous exposure to German in TV programmes and a "look at a German book".
Rosemary case
In 1931 a young girl from BlackpoolBlackpool
Blackpool is a borough, seaside town, and unitary authority area of Lancashire, in North West England. It is situated along England's west coast by the Irish Sea, between the Ribble and Wyre estuaries, northwest of Preston, north of Liverpool, and northwest of Manchester...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
began to speak in an ancient Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
dialect. She claimed to be under the influence of the personality of Babylonian princess and Pharaoh Amenhotep III's wife Telika-Ventiu, who supposedly lived about 3300 years ago. Rosemary stated that she "hears" the Egyptian words clairaudiently
Clairvoyance
The term clairvoyance is used to refer to the ability to gain information about an object, person, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses, a form of extra-sensory perception...
and repeated them aloud. During more than a thousand language tests, the girl had spoken some 5000 phrases and short sentences in the old Egyptian language. They were recorded phonetically and the first 800 of them were later identified and translated by an Egyptologist Mr. Hulme. He claimed that Rosemary's speech substantially and consistently conformed to what Egyptologists know today of the ancient Egyptian tongue. Three books on the Rosemary case have been published and two gramophone discs of xenoglossy have been recorded. Wood claimed that Rosemary was never tested by independent witnesses and the claims were not submitted to independent scholarly inquiry.
However, in the June, 1937, issue of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology or JEA is a scientific journal containing scholarly articles and reviews of recent books of importance to Egyptology....
, Battiscombe Gunn
Battiscombe Gunn
Battiscombe "Jack" George Gunn was an English Egyptologist and philologist. He published his first translation from Egyptian in 1906. He translated inscriptions for many important excavations and sites, including Fayum, Saqqara, Amarna, Giza and Luxor...
claimed that Hulme had manipulated the transcriptions to fit his own expectations of what he imagined ancient Egyptian to sound like. A later examination by John D. Ray
John D. Ray
Professor John D. Ray is the current Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge. His principal field of interest covers the Late and Hellenistic periods of Egypt, with special reference to documents in the demotic script, and he is also known for deciphering the...
(the current Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology
Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology
The Sir Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology represents the chair of Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, England.*Stephen Glanville, 1946–1956*Jack Plumley, 1957–1977*John Ray, 1977–present...
at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
) confirmed "there could be no mistaking Hulme's incompetence". Furthermore, both Ray and Gunn pointed out that Rosemary's visions of camels as domestic transport were inconsistent, as camels were not used for transport in 18th Dynasty Egypt.
Unsubstantiated cases
Proper scientific investigation of reports of xenoglossy is rare. More typical are press reports like that of Czech speedway rider Matěj KůsMatej Kus
Matěj Kůs is an international motorcycle speedway rider who rode for the Berwick Bandits in the British Premier League in 2007.- Career summary :...
from Pilsen, who, in September 2007 at the age of 18 reportedly awoke after a crash and was able to converse in perfect English. His ability did not last long and he was unable to remember anything from this episode. The press reports of his fluency in English are based entirely on the reports of his Czech team-mates. There is no record of his allegedly fluent speech or report by a skilled English speaker.