Language

Language, in Scripture, is the God-given capacity for articulate speech and, concretely, the particular tongue of a people — and the same word also names a Spirit-given utterance that the New Testament calls “other languages.” The text of Acts 2:11 records pilgrims from many nations hearing “the mighty works of God” spoken in “our languages,” that is, in recognizably human tongues; Mark 16:17 promises that signs will accompany believers, among them that “they will speak with new languages.”

The New Testament treats languages as a gift among others in the church. First Corinthians 12:10 lists “different kinds of languages” and “the interpretation of languages” alongside prophecy, healing and discernment of spirits, and Acts 10:46 and Acts 19:6 describe people speaking in other languages when the Spirit came upon them. First Corinthians 14 sets the gift within the assembly’s order: the one who prophesies “speaks to men for their edification, exhortation, and consolation” (14:3), while speaking in a language without interpretation does not build others up (14:5). Paul therefore resolves to pray and sing “with the spirit” and also “with the understanding” (14:15), and he envisions a gathering where each person brings a psalm, a teaching, a revelation, a language or an interpretation, with everything done “to build each other up” (14:26). Prophecy, in that same chapter, is described as laying bare “the secrets of his heart,” so that an outsider falls down and declares “God is among you indeed” (14:24–25).

Linguistically, the Greek word behind all these passages, glōssa, means the physical tongue and, by extension, a language or speech; the New Testament uses it both for the known languages of Acts 2:11 and for the congregational gift in 1 Corinthians. Whether those two are the same phenomenon, and whether the gift was intended to continue, is where Christian traditions part company rather than something the text settles.

Among the differences: Pentecostal and charismatic churches generally read the passages as promising a gift available to believers in every era, often distinguishing a devotional use of speech addressed to God (compare 1 Corinthians 14:15) from the public gift that requires interpretation; cessationist traditions hold that such sign gifts belonged to the apostolic founding period and are not normative now; and interpreters disagree over whether the Corinthian languages were foreign human languages, a heavenly or angelic speech, or ecstatic utterance, with some reading Acts 2 as the model for all of them and others distinguishing the two. Liturgical and Reformation-era traditions have also debated which language the church’s worship should be conducted in, appealing in different ways to the emphasis on intelligibility and building up the assembly in 1 Corinthians 14.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.