#1131 What is the oldest still spoken language?

What is the oldest still spoken language? This is a question that can never have a satisfactory answer because written records only go back so far, and a lot of languages were not written down until relatively recently. A reworking of this question could be how many speakers of modern languages would be able to understand the ancient version of those languages. The answer would probably be none of them.

You could quite safely say that every language spoken today is the oldest still spoken language because of the way languages mix and evolve. English, for example, is made up of Germanic languages, such as those from Denmark and the Netherlands, French, Latin, Celtic, and a few other languages. All of these languages are made up of a mixture of other languages, that were in turn made up of other languages, all the way back to the dawn of languages. You could argue that every language contains parts of the oldest languages.

Some of the languages that are often cited as the oldest and still spoken are Egyptian, Tamil, Sanskrit, Greek, and Amharic. Egyptian is obviously spoken in Egypt, Tamil in Southern India and Sri Lanka, Sanskrit in India, Greek in Greece, and Amharic in Ethiopia. They can all be traced back several thousand years, but therein lies the problem. There is no way of tracing any of them back to the dawn of language because there were no written records and there is no real way of knowing what people spoke. The earliest existing written document is a sentence in Egyptian hieroglyphs from 2690 BC. It was found on the tomb of a pharaoh from the 2^nd dynasty of Ancient Egypt. There are examples of Egyptian hieroglyphics that date from 3200 BC, but they are words and the example on the tomb is the first full sentence. If we assume that it takes at least 500 years for a language to form (a completely arbitrary number) then Egyptian has existed since 3700 BC, which is 5724 years. However, the language spoken in Egypt today is Egyptian Arabic and the language is completely different to Ancient Egyptian.

Sumerian is another ancient language that has been found on a document in 2600 BC. Just like with Ancient Egyptian, there are other records going back to 3500 BC, but they are an incomplete, proto-writing. However, for writing to be invented, there must be a language to write down and we know that Sumer is the oldest civilization in the world, going back to 4500 BC. We can probably assume that the Sumerian language goes back that far, or even further. However, again, as with Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian no longer exists.

As homo sapiens evolved in Africa and then spread out from there, the oldest languages probably came from that area. We evolved the ability to speak between 300 and 200,000 years ago. There are a lot of languages in that area, such as the Khoisan languages that use clicks, that probably evolved from those original languages, but then they evolved on and on, changing every time people moved or different tribes with different versions of the language came together. None of those languages are still spoken as they were.

There are some languages where modern speakers can still understand the ancient versions, but not many. Modern speakers of Greek can read Ancient Greek, but they cannot necessarily pronounce it or understand it. In the same way, English speakers can read many of the letters in Old English, but they can’t pronounce or understand it. Tamil speakers are said to be able to read and understand ancient Tamil. The oldest documented Tamil writing comes from about 500 BC, which isn’t as old as a lot of other languages, but it is still spoken and probably the least changed. With a history of 2,500 years, we can probably say that Tamil is the oldest still spoken language. Hebrew is another language that is sometimes said to be the oldest still spoken language, but it wasn’t spoken for for 1700 years. Hebrew was spoken in Israel and Judah from about 1200 BC. It was spoken until the 2^nd century AD. Jewish people were persecuted by the Romans and many were killed in AD 70. The remaining Jewish people were enslaved or driven out of Roman lands, and they began to speak Aramaic. However, they continued to use Hebrew as a written language. In the 18^th century, during the Age of Enlightenment, people started studying languages and Hebrew was one of those. Jewish people brought it back to life and turned it back into a spoken living language. This could give it a shot at the oldest continuously spoken language, but there is no way of knowing if it is pronounced exactly the same because it was brought back only from written texts. There was also quite a considerable gap. And this is what I learned today.

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