Musings About Heaven

What language will we speak?

The bible describes people of different ethnicities in heaven:

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

— Revelation 7:9,10

It seems to me that the multitude is speaking in unison using the same language, otherwise it would be more cacophony than chorus, and the Apostle John would not have recorded those words. And hence I surmise that everyone in heaven will speak one common language. Moreover, I think we will speak in a new language, not an existing earthly language.

Will we retain our existing languages, or we will be monolingual? The bible doesn't say. But my guess is that we will keep what we have, because our memory (and hence our abilities) will remain intact. Humanity will acquire a new lingua franca in heaven, in addition to the many languages on earth today.

Origin of Languages

Recall that different languages came about when God scattered humanity at the Tower of Babel. Genesis 11 records that the "whole world had one language and a common speech", and that God, in an instant, caused people to break out into different languages and to forget their original tongue. This led to communication confusion, to people abandoning the construction of the tower, and dispersing across the globe. In other words, languages are the creation of God. Of course, new languages and dialects may have developed since that time, but it is clear that God had created a sufficient number of distinct languages that the ancients could no longer understand one another. No one was bilingual back then.

(After thought: I speak Cantonese. I think it is a lovely language invented by God at the Babel event, although the modern version is probably very different.)

Partial Reversal at Pentecost

At Pentecost, there was a partial breaking of the language barrier when the Holy Spirit caused the disciples to speak in "tongues", i.e., other human languages. Interestingly, it seems that the speaker of the tongue could not understand his own utterance, which was why the Apostle Paul gave the following rule:

If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God.  — 1 Cor 14: 27,28

Tongues, then, is a supernatural ability to transcend the language barrier. But only partially, since the speaker lacked the ability to understand. Communication was only one-way.

Full Solution in Heaven

Heaven, however, will be when the language barrier will be demolished for good. Communication will be two-way. Again, this will be God's doing, not man's. Despite impressive research into natural language processing (a branch of AI) culminating in today's large language models, we cannot claim to have bridged all languages. Thankfully, the bible promises the answer: He who created the "problem" of languages in the first place is the only one able to solve it.

And solve it completely He will. We will no longer need technology to understand one another's mother tongue; instead, God will give us the ability to communicate in a new language with native fluency.

What's this New Language Like?

I like to think that this new common language will be super expressive, rich in idioms and metaphors, and a joy to speak and write in. Literature, poetry, and songs will be elevated in this language. Rhythm and rhyme and imagery will be unlike anything we have ever seen or heard. I further speculate that the written form of this language will have peculiar mathematical properties. I'm thinking of self-synchronizing computer code or overlapping instructions. This is where a written sentence makes sense even if you skip, say the first character, and start reading it from the second character onwards. The semantics will change depending on where you start reading, but the sentence conveys multiple meanings all at once. Which means if you craft your words carefully, you can cram all that you want to say in just one sentence. Isn't this super cool?

We see a hint of such a written code in our DNA, which only recently has been found to be double-coded, i.e., it conveys two meanings simultaneously. It instructs how to make proteins as well as how genes are controlled. It appears that our DNA may yet hold more undiscovered secrets. If DNA is proving to be an effective and efficient way of communicating biological information, how much more will a purposed-built super language created by God for our communication exhibit amazing properties? Perhaps such a language is already spoken today.

In heaven.

By God and His angels.

One day we will all speak it.

(After note 2: I just learned about this amazing poem, illustrating double-coding:

Star Gauge by Su Hui )