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Some of Snowcrash is specifically about Babel. 
> In those it does not kill, the Sumerian nam-shubs have an interesting effect. It makes them prone to glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Speaking in tongues is a neurological phenomenon which is exploited by religion. Snow Crash further posits that glossolalia recovers a now-lost ur-language, the language which supposedly existed prior to Babel. In the world of Snow Crash, that language is Sumerian, which is in fact the oldest written language, and has no known descendants. Like the Babelian ur-language, Sumerian disappeared without a trace. The novel suggests that it disappeared as a consequence of the nam-shubs, which spread through the population like a virus and destroyed its linguistic unity.

It suggests Babel was a psyop to liberate people from a language that enslaved them as a mind virus. Part of the arms-race of language development/abstraction.