Speech that resembles language without being intelligible as such. Often occurring in religious ecstasy as "speaking in tongues," where sound carries fervor beyond semantic sense. Where babble is meaningless, glossolalia implies meaning sought through utterance itself: voice reaching for the unsayable.

From Greek glōssa “tongue, language” + lalia “talking, speech.” Coined in learned discourse, the term gives clinical outline to an experience that participants often describe as anything but clinical.