ABSTRACT
Anthropologists usually cast their nets wider than to study in detail the narrow business of the tongues to be found in their various cultures. Believers in Pentecostalism would maintain that they were similar in that all Christian tongues were and are inspired by the Holy Spirit and that the Scriptural record of the Corinthian practice is the warrant for the modern exercise of the gift. If the similarity is accepted, then the conclusions of linguistics and psychology which can be drawn from present-day tongues can be applied to those of Corinth. Camisard tongues were remarkable for the purity of their French and the youth of their speakers, but are all explicable in terms of abnormal psychology. Some Christians with first-hand experience of speaking in tongues would clearly not accept W. J. Samarin’s findings as being applicable to themselves, and they must not be dismissed without a hearing.
