Yes, cringeworthy, better word, that's what it was.
There are a couple of references in the Bible to speaking in Tongues. There is also a very interesting history about how this notion of Tongues evolved in the Judaic religions to end up in the Pentecostal church as a sign of divine grace, the gift of Tongues in which God speaks through the individual.
1 Corinthians 14 / 27 - 2827 If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret.
28 If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God. I think this was more about learning the language of others and reciting parts of the Bible in the language of others.
Linguistic research on glossolalia, of which there has been a fair amount, shows that its involuntary nature is only partial. While those speaking in tongues can emit rapid-fire sequences of sounds that have all the intonations of actual speech and may sound remarkably like it, none has ever been recorded talking in a real language previously unknown to him; all true glossolalia is gibberish. Moreover, its speakers never utter sounds that do not already exist in the languages they do know; in creating what may seem on first hearing to be a genuinely unfamiliar tongue, they are drawing entirely on phonetic options that are familiar. And finally, the latest neuroscience has shown that the “languages” they converse in are not produced in the language centers of the brain but in a part of the left frontal lobe associated with willed activity and multitasking.
