Do You Remember Your Previous Life's Language in Your Present Incarnation?

Abstract

TrE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION in the title is No: the evidence available 1 to date offers no support for those who would prefer a YES answer. Before giving reasons for this conclusion, I would like to make two preliminary comments. One is a disclaimer directed toward people who believe in reincarnation or speaking in tongues; the other is an explanation directed toward linguists who do not believe and who wonder why a linguist would bother to address this question. For the first group, I want to emphasize that nothing I have to say has any implications, positive or negative, for a religious (or other) belief in reincarnation or for the religious experience known as speaking in tongues. A belief in reincarnation does not, surely, entail that a person could remember a language that s/he spoke in a previous incarnation; there is some evidence to suggest that people can forget their first language if they haven't spoken it for many years (e.g. T'sou 1975), so a person might reasonably be expected to forget a language s/he hadn't spoken for one or more lifetimes. As for speaking in tongues, or GLOSSOLALIA, the religious beliefs of traditional charismatic churches apparently do not insist that the linguistic manifestation be a real human language--only that it be spontaneous and subsequently interpreted, also spontaneously, by another church member. In linking glossolalia with purported languages of reincarnation as a linguistic phenomenon, I am neither suggesting a connection between the respective religious beliefs nor offering any evidence for or against the validity of either. For nonbelieving linguists, my comment is that this paper is not ajoke. If a person produces fluent-sounding speech, how do you tell whether what you're hearing is a real language or not? It's easy enough to prove that it's not a particular language, of course. But proving that it isn't ANY present or past human language presents the same sort of difficulty that any scientist encounters in trying to prove a negative. Looking for proof turns out to be methodologically interesting. The most efficient strategy is to gather data that should show patterning, and then demonstrate that no patterns are present. This paper concentrates on this aspect of the subject, but there is an additional problem that would be especially ap340