Xenoglossy
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Xenoglossy is the putative paranormal phenomenon in which a person is able to speak a language that he or she could not have acquired by natural means. For example, a person who speaks German fluently and like a native, but has never studied German, been to a German-speaking country, or associated with German-speakers, would be said to exhibit xenoglossy.
Xenoglossy has been used to support the idea of reincarnation on the basis that retention of knowledge of the language from a previous life is the only way to account for it. Scientific research into xenoglossy is quite rare and Professor Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist, had just a handful of suggestive cases. In a footnote in Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, Professor Stevenson lists the cases that he considered authentic and important:
- Swarnlatta Mishra (in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation): A girl in India who lived entirely among Hindi-speaking people but was able to sing songs in Bengali, as identified by Professor P. Pal of Itachuna College in West Bengal, who studied the case after Professor Stevenson and transcribed some of the songs.
- Uttara Huddar (in Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy): Uttara was a woman in India who normally spoke Marathi but, after participating in a meditation during a hospitalization, began speaking in Bengali, much to the bewilderment of her parents.
- Two hypnotic regression cases: Professor Stevenson is quite skeptical of most hypnotic regression work but he did have two cases that included responsive xenoglossy; that is, hypnotic subjects who could converse with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words. One is that of Jensen (in Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of a Case), an American woman who, while under hypnosis conducted by her physician husband, described being a Swedish peasant farmer and was able to converse in Swedish. The other is Gretchen (in Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy), an American woman who was hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband and began spontaneously speaking in German. She described the life of a teenaged girl in Germany, and Professor Stevenson, who is able to speak German, was able to converse with her.
Linguist Sarah Thomason concluded from her analysis of the cases described by Stevenson that in all but one case the language knowledge displayed was minimal and could easily have been learned by casual exposure. In the one case in which she considered the subject's language knowledge to be non-trivial, that of Uttara Huddara, a Marathi woman in Mumbai (Bombay) who could speak Bengali, Thomason argues that the language could easily have been acquired by natural means: Bengali and Marathi are closely related languages, the woman had a life-long interest in Bengali language and culture and had many Bengali acquaintances, and people in Bombay are exposed to Bengali in such contexts as the cinema since many films are made in Bengali.
Robert Alemeder has responded to some of what Thomason has said, and argues:
- "Thomason's alternative explanation here seems more like a hand-waving dismissal than an attempt to show how we can replicate such a phenomena without having to adopt Stevenson's thesis that in fact these people have spoken in a foreign language they did not learn in this life." [1]
Professor Stevenson had tapes of Uttara Huddara evaluated by a linguist and thoroughly investigated the possibility that the woman could have learned Bengali through normal means, and he concluded that reincarnation was the best interpretation of the case. (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1999, 63: 268-291).
[edit] References
- Stevenson, Ian. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. (1966). (Second revised and enlarged edition 1974), University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813908728
- Stevenson, Ian. Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. (1984). University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813909945
- Stevenson, Ian. Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Quest of Reincarnation. (2001). McFarland & Company, ISBN 0-7864-0913-4
- Thomason, Sarah G. "Do you remember your previous life's language in your present incarnation?" American Speech, 59:340–50, 1984.
- Thomason, Sarah G. "Past tongues remembered?" The Skeptical Inquirer, 11:367–75, Summer 1987.
