Looking at "Praying in Tongues" as a Linguist

 I was thinking today about "praying in tongues" or "speaking in tongues" while I was on my way home from taking the trash to the dump. (Wednesdays are trash run days here in Ohio County, Kentucky if you don't want to pay for trash service. ) I've been to a number of tongues churches in my life, though it has never been a home for me in any way, and I've known a number of folks who use the practice in their worship. Rather than thinking about it as a theologian, today I was thinking about it in terms of my other major interest, languages and linguistics, and I realized something.
      Something is very off linguistically with the majority of "tongues" speakers and prayers. What do I mean by this? Every language has its own set of both vowel and consonant sounds that tend to be unique to that language. Even among related languages like the Romance languages, the phonemics of the languages differ from one another in some way. The same is true among the Germanic languages. While Dutch and German may sound similar to the English speaking ear, their sound schemes are actually quite different. The difference is far more pronounced the farther away from English that you get. Many languages have consonants or vowels which simply do not occur in English and take quite a bit of practice for the English speaker's tongue to master. The "hard 'h'" sound which occurs in Semitic languages, comes to mind, but also the glottal stop with which many tribal Papua New Guinea languages are rife. Gimi and Bisorio both have multiple types. And then there are the plosive consonants which occur in various tribal languages, as well as clicks, and the tongue twisting plosive clicks of Xhosa. Where vowels are concerned, Irish Gaelic comes to mind as their vowels only slightly resemble the vowels sounds English speakers know lending themselves to the Irish accent. The human mouth is capable of making far more sounds than we realize and nearly all of them are used in the 7-8000 recognized languages around the world, not including dialects.
     In addition to the phonemics, languages have grammar which dictates how they are used, and that grammar can vary wildly between them. But unless someone is deliberately repeating something, the sentence structure will rarely repeat the same cluster of phonemes twice. Even particles and discrete units indicating grammatical function are rarely repeated one right after another.
     Why do I bring all of this up? Because every time I have heard someone "speaking in tongues" or "praying in tongues" the phonemics they use are almost always, 99% of the time, native to English or the native language of the speaker in some way or another. The "sh" sound makes a frequent appearance, as does the "l" sound. There's a lot of the "a" as in "father" usually. "b", "j", "f", and a few others are used over and over again. There are many repetitions of the same strings of sounds. In short, nothing of what I have ever heard from a tongues speaker has ever sounded like real spoken language. The one exception I can think of is one lady I knew who, when she prayed in tongues, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the phonemic structure of the somewhat deciphered Linear A, that is, ancient Minoan, that I went over once upon a time.
     "But they're speaking heavenly languages or the languages of angels!" Someone might protest. Again, this doesn't track. Why would non-corporeal spirits, who do not have mouths, tongues, or vocal chords need human pronouncible language to communicate with one another? And if they were to use language to communicate with a human being, every single record of this has them speaking a language that human being already knows. And even then, wouldn't such languages still follow the patterns of language itself?
     Finally, speaking as someone who knows the Scriptures, the only recorded instance in the Bible itself describes the "tongues" being spoken as known, intelligible languages that were unknown to the person speaking them, and they were being spoken to people who could understand and interpret them.
     I understand that many people find comfort and a spirituality in praying this way. I am not saying it is wrong. But from a linguist's standpoint, and from a Scriptural standpoint, most of the time, it is still nonsensical gibberish all things considered. As Paul wrote, it's better to speak five words that make sense than ten thousand in a "tongue" no one understands, even the speaker.