ABSTRACT
The English word language is related to the French word langue, tongue. In many languages the ability and the ‘gift’ of speech is named after the chief organ used in speaking, the tongue. So ‘speaking in tongues’ is that strange phenomenon that names the ability to speak in languages one didn’t know that one had mastery of. In German the word for dialect is Mundart, ‘the manner of your mouth’. Unless we have some sense of how tongue and mouth interact in the bodily act of talking, we shall find it difficult to understand how children’s spellings come to be as they are.
