to speak in tongues
2
9.8
- idiom
:
hablar en lenguas
- And it says if I speak in tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
- start speaking in tongues
- said I spoke in tongues
So they, they speak in tongues.
- So they, they speak in tongues.
- You know, come to me, you know, all the children, but you know, they were speaking in tongues.
- They're led by a guy named Montanus and his big thing was his big focus and his cult was speaking in tongues, prophesying.
- They also practice a form of aesthetic holiness, shunning flamboyant dress and alcohol, practicing foot washing, and speaking in tongues.
- And there was a she would speak in tongues and she would be driving and she'd go.
Examples
-
You speak in tongues?
-
He's speaking in tongues.
-
And so the theory was when you speak in tongues or when you channel, you have to drop the function in your brain.
-
Maybe she thought she was speaking in tongues.
-
Are you speaking in tongues, boy?
-
I can speak in tongues.
-
And he speaks in tongues.
-
The priest spoke in tongues, William said.
Fiction book (1998) -
Scripture says, he who speaks in tongues edifies himself.
-
During the church service, many members began to speak in tongues as they felt a surge of spiritual ecstasy.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The parts 'speak' + 'in' + 'tongues' transparently suggest 'speak in languages', so a B1 learner who knows the constituents can infer a basic sense of speaking using languages or unusual speech. However, the conventional meaning — specifically the religious/glossolalic sense of unintelligible, ecstatic utterance — is a specialized, culture-bound extension that is not fully predictable from the literal parts. The construction does occur in many languages (e.g. Spanish 'hablar en lenguas'), which helps comprehension, but the precise religious nuance still requires prior exposure.
Etymology
Speak in tongues comes from religious meetings where people believed the Holy Spirit spoke through someone, causing them to speak in different tongues and make strange sounds that other people did not understand. So the phrase means 'to say words or sounds that others cannot understand during a spiritual or religious experience'.