Xenoglossia

Xenoglossia, or xenoglossy, is a facility claimed by some spirit mediums and other psychics to be able to speak, write or understand a language that they have not learned formally. The term derives from the Ancient Greek xenos, meaning “foreigner” and glossa, meaning “tongue”,^[1] and was coined by the French physiologist Charles Richet in 1905.^[2][a]Richet called it xénoglossie.^[3] Claims have been made by believers such as Ian Richardson, the author of Xenoglossy (1974) and Unlearned Language (1984), that the existence of the phenomenon provides “powerful evidence” in favour of reincarnation.^[3]

Despite there being no scientific evidence that the phenomenon actually exists,^[4][5] the Canadian psychiatrist Ian Stevenson distinguished between two types of xenoglossia: recitative, using the unlearned language in a rote, uncomprehending manner; and responsive, the ability to converse intelligibly in that language.^[6]

Stevenson considered two cases in which a subject under hypnosis could allegedly converse with people speaking a foreign language, rather than merely reciting foreign words, and a third in which a “past incarnation” was revealed as she was being treated for a mental disorder:^[3]

• “Jensen Jacoby”, putatively a seventeenth-century Swede who represented a past incarnation of a thirty-seven-year-old American housewife identified only as “TE”. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in Swedish, although not fluently.
• “Gretchen”, putatively a German teenage girl who represented a past incarnation of the American housewife Dolores Jay while under hypnosis. Stevenson claimed that Dolores was able to converse in German.
• “Sharada,” putatively a nineteenth-century Bengali who represented a past incarnation of a Maharashtra woman in her thirties named Uttara Huddar.

Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan, reanalysed these cases, concluding that “the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy”.^[7] The psychologist David Lester also evaluated Stevenson’s cases, and wrote that the subjects made grammatical errors, mispronounced words, and did not display a wide vocabulary of words in a foreign language; he thus concluded that they cannot be considered evidence for xenoglossy.^[8]