@bro. Dexter for YAH, on consideration I realise that you are correct in distinguishing prayer tongues from the gift of tongues. They are very different.
The word "tongues" truly does mean "languages" (well, it means literal physical tongues that you lick with, but it is used in Greek to mean languages). A language is complicated. It has multiple words, grammar, structure - when you hear someone talking in a language, even if you don't understand the language, it is very obvious that somebody is speaking a real language. While when you hear someone simply making repetitive sounds, it's obvious they are not speaking a real language.
Importantly,
it is possible to derive considerable depth of spiritual feeling from saying repetitive, meaningless sounds - that is what a mantra is in eastern meditation. It focuses the mind. Some Christians also meditate using mantras, which is a controversial practice that I'm not advocating, but it is not prohibited in scripture. A common mantra in Christian meditation is "maranathra", an ancient Aramaic word meaning "Lord, come" that has been used as a blessing & in prayer by Christians since the first century, and that happens to have a rhythm that makes it easy to focus on to exclude other thoughts. Being not a word we actually use in common speech it naturally resolves itself into a series of meaningless sounds that allows you to focus on nothing and leave any actual communication to the Holy Spirit, rather than being something where you focus on the meaning of the word itself.
"Tongues" as a prayer language tends in practice to be similarly repetitive sounds that help the practitioner achieve an attitude of prayerfulness. If you hear someone "praying in tongues", they usually repeat the same set of sounds over and over, varying the order and occasionally saying something different but always returning to a very limited set of repeated sounds. This is near-identical to someone meditating by repeating a mantra.
Meditation to a mantra is a spiritual practice that truly does give a feeling of deep communication with God. Which means that just because you feel deep communication with God does not mean that you're speaking in tongues, there may be another explanation that has far more historical basis. Remember that "meaningless tongues as a prayer language" only really appeared in the last 150 years (as far as we know), but meditation to mantras is ancient and appears in basically all religious traditions in one form or another. It is worth considering that this may simply be a misapplied name for an ancient practice that has nothing to do with the gift of tongues.
People often say it took them a lot of time to be able to speak in tongues. That also is like how it takes a lot of time for someone to develop the ability to meditate without distraction. In scripture, tongues was not something people had to work on - one minute they were talking normally and the next they were speaking a whole new language. This is another indication that prayer tongues may have more in common with meditation than with scriptural tongues.
I think if we understand "prayer tongues" to be a form of meditation (whether or not they are named correctly), we will not mix it up with the gift of tongues. But this also means it is not evidence of receiving the Holy Spirit.
