the tongue: the bodily organ in the mouth, and by extension the speech it produces
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
At its plainest the word names the fleshy organ in the mouth, the body part you taste and speak with. From there it stretches naturally, as it does in English, to stand for speech itself: "the tongue" becomes a person's words and the way they use them.
The Bible exploits both ends of this range freely. The Gospels touch a mute man's tongue and loosen a silenced one; the rich man begs for water to cool his tongue. But just as often "tongue" simply means what a person says:
deceit on the tongue
a tongue that confesses or curses
a tongue no one can tame
The two are not separate words but one image seen at two distances. The organ stands for the speaking it does. The senses below sort the uses by whether the verse has the physical organ chiefly in view or has slid over to the speech the organ makes.
a language: the tongue spoken by a particular people or nation
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
The same word names a whole people's language, exactly as English "tongue" can ("the mother tongue"). This was ordinary Greek long before the Bible, but the Greek Old Testament made it the dominant biblical use, regularly translating the Hebrew word for language (לשׁון) and fixing the pairing of "tongue" with "nation" and "people."
In the New Testament this sense lives mostly in Revelation, where a fourfold roll call of "tribe and tongue and people and nation" sweeps up the whole human race before God. A language is what marks one people off from another, so to list every tongue is to leave no one out. The sense below gathers the uses where the word means the speech of a people, almost always in those sweeping lists of all the peoples of the earth.
a tongue-shaped object: something whose form resembles a tongue, here a flame
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
Because a tongue has a recognizable shape, the word can name anything that looks like one. Greek used it for:
a tongue of land
the reed of a pipe
a flicker of flame
even a gold ingot shaped like a tongue
and the Greek Old Testament already speaks this way.
The New Testament uses it once in this concrete sense, at Pentecost, where what settles on the disciples looks like tongues made of fire. The word is not chosen at random there: the flame-tongues come to rest on people who are about to speak, so the shape and the speaking play off each other. This is a single, vivid use rather than a broad category, kept distinct here because it names a thing seen rather than an organ or a language.
Act 2:3*
4
the gift of tongues: Spirit-prompted speech in the early church, spoken in a tongue the speaker has not learned
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyContested
The most discussed New Testament use applies the familiar word to a new thing: a kind of speech the Holy Spirit gives, which the speaker has not learned and which others cannot follow unless it is interpreted. This is not a sixth dictionary meaning the word brought with it from Greek; it is the everyday word "language" stretched to name a fresh experience in the church. That is why "to speak in tongues" can be read so plainly as "to speak in languages."
In Acts the gift first appears as recognizable foreign languages: at Pentecost the disciples speak and people from many nations hear their own native speech. The later episodes in Acts drop the detail of a foreign audience and present the gift simply as Spirit-given praise. In Paul's letters to Corinth the gift is usually unintelligible to hearers and needs an interpreter, and Paul calls it speech addressed to God rather than to people, and the plural "kinds of tongues" suggests more than one form.
Exactly what kind of speech this was is the sharpest dispute in the study of this word, and the entry-level dispute below lays out the main positions without taking sides. What is not in dispute is that the word for it is the ordinary word for a tongue or a language, used in a new way by the first Christians.
Nuances
4athe gift in Acts, first heard as known foreign languages
Mrk 16:17*Act 2:4*Act 2:11*Act 10:46*Act 19:6*
4bthe gift in Paul's Corinthian letters: Spirit-prompted speech, addressed to God and needing interpretation
Whether "the tongues of angels" in 1 Corinthians 13:1 implies that the gift of tongues could be a real heavenly language, or is rhetorical overstatement within a climactic list of impossible feats.
contestedPaul and the Corinthians may genuinely have thought of the gift as including the speech of angels, drawing on Jewish texts that describe heavenly languages.; G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014), 630; E. E. Ellis, NTS 20 (1973-74)
contestedThe phrase is hypothetical hyperbole inside a series of escalating impossibilities, not a statement of what the gift actually is.; R. H. Gundry, JTS 17 (1966): 299-307; C. Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment, WUNT 2/75 (1995), 181-87
the Greek word covers the physical organ, a people's language, a tongue-shaped flame, and a spiritual gift all at once, a span no single English use of "tongue" carriesMrk 7:33Act 2:3
Both
both name the organ in the mouth and the speech it makesJas 3:5Rom 3:13
Only tongue
in modern English "tongue" for "language" sounds archaic or poetic, so a plain reader may miss that "every tongue" and "speak in tongues" are using an ordinary word for language
the same word also means the bodily organ and a spiritual gift, so the original ties "language" to the tongue that speaks it in a way the English word does notRev 5:9
Both
both name the speech that distinguishes one people from anotherRev 7:9Rev 11:9
Only language
"language" in English is a neutral, abstract term, losing the bodily image of a "tongue" that the Greek keeps
the word is simply the plural of the ordinary term for a tongue or language, so the original does not by itself signal ecstasy or unintelligibility, only that more than one tongue or language is in viewAct 2:41Co 14:5
Both
—
Only tongues
in English "tongues" has become a technical religious label for the charismatic gift, often heard as ecstatic babble, a freight the plain Greek word does not carry on its own
How glōssa differs from similar Greek words
φωνήvoice or sound, the bare noise made; a tongue is the organ or the structured language that voice carries, so a tongue without a known language is, as Paul says, just so much sound
Names the physical tongue, the organ in the mouth that forms speech and tastes, as a body part Jesus touches or the rich man longs to cool.Mrk 7:33Luk 16:24
Stands for what a person says as a moral instrument of the whole self: a tongue that blesses or curses, lies or confesses, and so reveals the heart.Jas 3:5Jas 3:81Jn 3:18Php 2:11
Names a whole people group by the language they speak, listed alongside nation and tribe to map out all humanity.Rev 5:9Rev 7:9
Both
Both can name a human language as a distinct system of meaning. A tongue is the language a people speaks; a voice can likewise stand for one of the many languages in the world, each of which carries meaning to those who know it.1Co 14:2Rev 17:151Co 14:101Co 14:11
Names a sound as something heard, including the cry of an animal, an instrument, or thunder, where no tongue or words are involved at all.Rev 9:91Co 14:71Co 14:8
Names the voice as the audible event that carries from a speaker to a hearer, the thing that breaks the silence: a voice from heaven, a shout, a cry.Mrk 1:11Mat 3:3Jhn 11:43Act 7:60
Is recognized and followed as the distinctive voice of a particular person, like sheep who know their shepherd's voice and will not follow a stranger.Jhn 10:4Jhn 10:5Jhn 10:27
διάλεκτοςthe particular speech or dialect of a place or group; Luke uses it to spell out exactly what the Pentecost tongues were, the native language each crowd member spoke
Names the physical organ in the mouth, the literal tongue, something διάλεκτος never means.Mrk 7:33Luk 16:24Jas 3:5
Stands for the tongue as the instrument of human speech, praise, or slander, the body part doing the talking rather than the language being spoken.Rom 14:11Php 2:111Pe 3:10
Is the word for the Spirit-given gift of speaking in tongues, the ecstatic or miraculous utterance prayed and prophesied in the early church.Act 2:41Co 12:101Co 14:2
Serves as shorthand for a whole people defined by its speech, listed alongside tribe, nation, and people as one of the categories of humanity.Rev 5:9Rev 13:7
Both
Both can mean a real human language one actually speaks and understands: at Pentecost the crowd heard each its own native speech, where γλῶσσα names the tongues spoken and διάλεκτος names the language each heard.Act 2:11Act 2:8
Always points to a specific named human language or local speech, identified by its community (Jerusalem residents, Hebrews), never an organ, never an ecstatic gift, never a people-group label.Act 1:19Act 21:40Act 26:14
λόγοςa word or reasoned message, language as meaningful content; a tongue is the organ or the language-system through which such words are produced
Names the physical organ in the mouth, the actual tongue you taste and speak with.Mrk 7:33Luk 16:24Jas 3:5
Means a human language or dialect, a people group identified by the speech they share.Act 2:11Rev 5:9Rev 7:9
Names the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues, ecstatic utterance that needs interpreting to be understood.Act 2:41Co 12:101Co 14:2
Both
Both can name the spoken, verbal channel of communication, what is uttered with the mouth (set here against deeds, or against silent meaning).1Jn 3:181Co 14:19
means a language or known speech, the word for the many tongues of the nations and for the gift of speaking in unlearned languagesAct 2:41Co 14:2Rev 7:9
the small organ singled out as the hardest part of a person to control, the restless tongue that sets a whole life on fireJas 3:5Jas 3:8Jas 1:26
Both
both stand by figure for what a person says, the instrument through which the heart's words are confessed or poured outRom 14:11Rom 10:9
both can be loosed in praise: when Zechariah recovers his speech his mouth is opened and his tongue freed in the same momentLuk 1:64
the mouth as the bodily opening that takes in food and from which words come out, including very physical uses like a coin found in a fish's mouth or a sponge held up to Jesus' mouthMat 17:27Mat 15:11Jhn 19:29
stands for the source and authority of speech: God speaking through the mouth of the prophets, a matter established by the mouth of two or three witnesses, and by extension the deadly edge (literally the mouth) of a swordAct 3:182Co 13:1Heb 11:34
Names a whole language, and then the people counted by the language they speak, which is why the lists of the nations before God run "every tribe and tongue".Act 2:4Act 2:11Rev 5:9Rev 7:9Rev 14:6
Names the moving organ inside the mouth as something that can be touched, set free, cooled with water, or bitten in pain.Mrk 7:33Mrk 7:35Luk 1:64Luk 16:24Rev 16:10
Names the gift of Spirit-prompted speech in the early church, speech nobody understands until someone interprets it.1Co 12:101Co 13:11Co 14:21Co 14:27
Describes an object merely shaped like a tongue, with no speaking involved at all, as with the flames that settled on the disciples at Pentecost.Act 2:3
Is pictured as a small part of the body with runaway power of its own: a fire nobody can tame, needing to be reined in like an animal.Jas 1:26Jas 3:5Jas 3:6Jas 3:8
Both
Both stand for what a person actually says, so a single sentence can stack them together as the working parts of harmful speech.Rom 3:13
Both are named as things a person must guard and hold back, since either one can carry lies.1Pe 3:10
Names the outward, visible surface of worship, the part that keeps moving in prayer and praise while the heart stays far away.Mat 15:8Mrk 7:6
Names what a worshiper lifts up to God as an offering, praise called the "fruit of lips" that openly confesses his name.Heb 13:15
Steps outside the body altogether and names the edge or rim of a thing, here the shore where the sea meets the land.Heb 11:12
glōssa in the other biblical languages
לָשׁוֹןHebrew“tongue”the Hebrew word the Greek Old Testament most often renders as this word, covering both the bodily tongue and a people's language; it is the direct background for the "tongue" and "language" senses but carries no charismatic-gift use
Names the New Testament gift of tongues, speaking in a language given by the Spirit, a phenomenon with no counterpart in the Hebrew word's range.Act 2:41Co 14:21Co 13:1
Appears as divided tongues like fire resting on the disciples, a visible sign image the Greek word carries that the Hebrew does not.Act 2:3
Both
Both are the standard word for the speaking tongue treated as a moral force, the small organ that blesses or curses and that the wise must govern; the Greek regularly renders the Hebrew in this sense.Psa 34:13Pro 18:21Jas 3:5Jas 3:8
Both name a distinct human language and so a people defined by it, the New Testament listing every tribe and tongue much as the Old Testament numbers the nations by their tongues.Zec 8:23Rev 5:9Rev 7:9
Both can name the tongue caught up in praise, the speaker's tongue moved to glad or grateful speech to God.Psa 51:14Act 2:26
Stretches to objects shaped like a tongue, a bar of gold or a strip of land jutting into the sea, a concrete extension the Greek word never takes.Jos 7:21Jos 15:2
Names a foreign people directly by its language in the table of nations, the standard Old Testament idiom for a tongue and the nation bound to it.Gen 10:5Gen 10:20
שָׂפָהHebrew“lips”the Hebrew word for "lip," which can also mean a people's speech or language, as at Babel; it overlaps the "language" sense from a different body part
names the miraculous gift of speaking in languages the speaker never learned, poured out by the Spirit. This whole phenomenon has no counterpart in the Hebrew word for lips.Act 2:4Mrk 16:171Co 14:2
is the organ inside the mouth that tastes and moves, not the outer rim of the mouth: a man burning in torment begs for water to cool it, and Jesus touches a deaf man's tongue to heal him.Luk 16:24Mrk 7:33
is pictured as a small but untamable member of the body, a restless fire full of poison that no one can subdue on their own.Jas 3:5Jas 3:6Jas 3:8
Both
both name the organ of speech standing for the words a person actually says, which can guard the truth or deal in deceit.1Pe 3:10Psa 34:13
both can mean a language, the distinct tongue of a whole people, so that nations are counted off by their differing speech.Rev 7:9Gen 11:7
both stand for the speech that praises and confesses God, the mouth's offering lifted up in worship.Php 2:11Psa 63:3
names the edge, brink, or rim of a physical thing with no reference to speech at all: the sand on the seashore, the bank of a river, the rim of a great basin.Gen 22:17Gen 41:31Ki 7:23
is a visible feature of the face, described for its beauty, like a scarlet thread or a bed of spices.Sng 4:3Sng 5:13
The Greek word still names the physical organ in the mouth. It is the tongue Jesus touches when he heals a man who cannot speak, the tongue that is set free when Zechariah speaks again, and the tongue a suffering man begs to have cooled with a drop of water. The Aramaic word never does this.Mrk 7:33Mrk 7:35Luk 1:64Luk 16:24
It stands for a person's own speech and the moral weight of it: the religion that is worthless because the speaker keeps no guard on what he says, the small part of the body that no one can tame, the command to keep your speech from evil, the call to love in action rather than in talk.Jas 1:26Jas 3:81Pe 3:101Jn 3:18
It names the gift of speech given in worship that the hearers do not recognize, which is why Paul spends a whole chapter on when it helps a gathering and when it needs someone to put it into words everyone can follow.Act 2:4Act 10:461Co 14:21Co 14:27
It can stand for the whole person as a speaker making a public admission, so that "every tongue" means every human being owning up to who God is.Rom 14:11Php 2:11
Both
Both words can mean a group of people marked out by the language they speak rather than the speech itself, which is why English Bibles can put "tongue" in both places and mean a nation of speakers.Dan 3:4Rev 7:9
Both belong to the same fixed roll call of peoples, nations, and languages that measures how far a ruler's authority runs. Revelation supplies the Greek wording for that list, and the pattern it follows is the Aramaic one from Daniel.Dan 7:14Rev 13:7Rev 14:6
The Aramaic word means only a body of people identified by the speech they share. It is never the organ in the mouth and never what one person happens to say, so it is always counted alongside peoples and nations rather than alongside lips and mouths.Dan 3:4Dan 5:19Dan 6:25
All seven of its uses sit inside a royal announcement or a vision of rule, addressed to everyone the throne claims to govern, so the word measures the reach of a king rather than describing how anyone talks.Dan 3:7Dan 3:29Dan 4:1
What scholars say about glōssa
The standard reference works map a wide but stable range for this word: the bodily organ (with the metonym "speech"), the language of a people, and anything tongue-shaped (a flame, an ingot, a tongue of land), and among the ancient grammarians a technical sense of an obscure or foreign word needing explanation. The Greek Old Testament makes "language of a people" the dominant biblical use, rendering the Hebrew word for tongue in well over a hundred places and fixing the formula "people, nation, and tongue" that stands behind Revelation. The contested question is whether the New Testament adds a further sense, an ecstatic non-cognitive utterance, for the Corinthian gift. The twentieth-century consensus codified in Behm's TDNT article and Conzelmann's commentary said yes, on the model of the Delphic oracle and the mystery cults. That account has eroded badly: Christopher Forbes's Prophecy and Inspired Speech (1995) showed that the alleged Greco-Roman parallels collapse on inspection, that no ancient source actually calls oracular or magical speech by this word, and that the supposed parallels are mostly intelligible speech anyway, while D. A. Carson noted that the patristic citations once used to anchor the "ecstatic" definition (Origen, Irenaeus) do not even contain the word. On Acts 2 critical commentators are nearly unanimous that Luke depicts a miracle of speaking in real foreign languages rather than a miracle of hearing. On Paul the field is genuinely divided among several readings, surveyed below in the disputes.
Where scholars disagree about glōssa
What kind of speech the Corinthian "gift of tongues" was, and whether the New Testament adds an "ecstatic non-cognitive utterance" sense to this word at all.
contestedSpirit-prompted speech of more than one kind, addressed to God, neither identical to the foreign languages of Acts 2 nor the same as pagan ecstasy; possibly including unlearned earthly languages in some cases and heavenly speech in others.; G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014); M. Turner, The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts (1996)
contestedReal, unlearned human languages throughout, continuous with Acts 2; the noun means "language" in this whole field and the gift of interpretation naturally means translation.; R. H. Gundry, JTS 17 (1966): 299-307; C. Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech, WUNT 2/75 (1995); D. A. Carson, Showing the Spirit (1987)
contestedPre-articulate welling-up of the human spirit brought to intelligible speech by interpretation, rather than translation of a fixed language.; A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000), 970-88
minorityUnintelligible ecstatic utterance on the model of the Delphic oracle and the mystery cults, the older twentieth-century reading whose Greco-Roman parallels have since been heavily contested.; J. Behm, TDNT 1:719-27; H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, Hermeneia (1975), 234; J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
minorityHigh-status esoteric or "divine" speech functioning as a prestige marker in the Greco-Roman setting, which Paul deliberately subordinates to the more accessible gift of prophecy.; D. B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (1995), 87-103; D. B. Martin, JAAR 59 (1991): 547-89
In-depth research
This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.
Sources
J. Behm, 'γλῶσσα, ἑτερόγλωσσος,' TDNT 1:719-27lexicon
BDAG, 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. γλῶσσαlexicon
LSJ, 9th ed. (1940), s.v. γλῶσσαlexicon
H. Balz and G. Schneider, eds., EDNT 1:251-55lexicon
J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 8.21; 33.2; 33.103lexicon
C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (1994)lexicon
M. Silva, ed., NIDNTTE (2014)lexicon
C. Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment, WUNT 2/75 (1995)monograph
D. A. Carson, Showing the Spirit (1987), 77-88monograph
R. H. Gundry, "'Ecstatic Utterance' (N.E.B.)?," JTS 17 (1966): 299-307article
G. D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014)commentary
A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000), 970-88commentary
A. C. Thiselton, 'The Interpretation of Tongues? A New Suggestion in the Light of Greek Usage in Philo and Josephus,' JTS 30 (1979): 15-36article
H. Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, Hermeneia (1975), 234commentary
J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (1975), 242-46monograph
M. Turner, The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts (1996)monograph
D. B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (1995), 87-103monograph
D. B. Martin, 'Tongues of Angels and Other Status Indicators,' JAAR 59 (1991): 547-89article
C. S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, vol. 1 (2012), 821-31commentary
J. A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles, AB (1998), 233-41commentary