Contesting Languages

Abstract

How did the early followers of Jesus struggle with the many languages around them? This book argues that the idea that speaking tongue(s) is an ecstatic unintelligible phenomenon is an invention of German romantic-nationalist scholarship. It proposes another way of looking at this phenomenon through the lenses of immigration and the politics of language. Tongue(s) is a phenomenon of heteroglossia (the multiplicity of languages) and a site of political contestation. Two forces of language are at work in the New Testament: the centripetal forces of the silencing and unifying structure of monolingualism, and the centrifugal forces of tongue(s) as the heteroglossic gesture of welcoming linguistic others. As a competing social imagination, heteroglossia promises a radical openness and a hospitable space for the others, the foreigners.