God's punishment at Babel was tongues!
The gift of tongues in Acts was different. In the New Testament "tongue" means "a language." The three examples of tongue speaking are found in Acts 2:5-11, Acts 10:44-46, and Acts 19:6. All New Testament tongues were ACTUAL LANGUAGES and understood by those who heard it. Clearly, the purpose of New Testament tongues was to COMMUNICATE the Gospel.
Modern day tongues are not actual languages; only a type of self-generated gibberish showing the signs of a psychologically induced phenomenon; based on the speaker’s linguistic background. Professor William J. Samarin of the University of Toronto's Department of Linguistics Research rejected the possibility that modern day tongues could be real languages. According to Samarin, glossolalia is mere "pseudo-language." His definition of glossolalia is "unintelligible babbling speech that exhibits superficial phonological similarity to language, without having consistent syntagmatic structure and that is not systematically derived from or related to known language." (William J. Samarin, "Variation and Variables in Religious Glossolalia," Language in Society, ed. Dell Haymes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972 pgs. 121-130) From the thousands of tongues that have been tested by linguists, no actual languages were found.
Charismatics of course tell many tales about somebody somewhere recognizing some language at a prayer meeting, but the funny thing is… this always happens to someone else.
When tested, some tongues turn out to be blasphemies... So now there is a push in some charismatic circles to test them. But how do you test what nobody understands? Besides the human soul is an open vessel; it can hold God's grace in one minute and Satan in the next. What assurances can there be that the tongues that were found harmless will not deteriorate into blasphemies? And again, who would know the difference?
The proliferation of tongues in modern times is actually biblical; we find it in Genesis 11:9 as a punishment on Babel. Once again charismatic theology applies the reverse of “tongues” and promotes nonsensical jibber-jabber rather than the communication of the Gospel.
