What is the world’s oldest language?

Ancient cuneiform tablet

What is the world’s oldest language?

The quick answer is that it’s impossible to know. That doesn’t stop some people from asserting, perhaps out of understandable national pride, that theirs is the oldest.  In a recent online discussion I read, I saw languages such as Irish, Welsh, Tamil and Greek being offered up as the world’s, or Europe’s, most venerable tongue.

Do you mean the oldest written language?

Sumerian would be a great shout for being the world’s oldest written language.  There are extensive records of the written Sumerian language left in the form of cuneiform tablets, and these go back to around 3200 BC.  The earliest example found so far is the Kish tablet from 3500 BC; this represents a transitional form between pictographic proto-writing and Sumerian cuneiform.  There have been examples of petroglyphs (marks on stones) or drawings in caves that could represent much earlier writing, albeit not a fully formed writing system in which the whole language can be expressed.  This makes that point that we need to decide what is writing and what is just a picture or a visual aid – there is a grey area between the two.  Within Europe, there are Cretan hieroglyphs dating back to around 2100 BC.

And what about the earliest spoken language?

If we were just to talk about written languages, that would disadvantage languages such as Irish, Greek or the languages of Australia where oral literature clearly predates the time when anything was written down.  But then, a Greek epic didn’t just arrive fully formed; the earliest Greek poets would have learnt the same language from their parents.  So how far back do you go?

A family affair

If you go far enough back in time, almost all European languages and many on the Indian sub-continent are related to each other as part of the Indo-European family of languages.  Over time, they have diverged and become different.  For example, Latin spread out from Rome and over the years developed into daughter languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc).  This means that you can’t say one language is older than another if you go back far enough.  It is like saying your grandparents are older than your cousin’s.  What’s more, the different languages often interact and influence each other in history.  For example, English and Danish are both Germanic languages, so will have the same Germanic root.  They will then have divided off into the West and North Germanic branches… but much later in history, the Danes came over to England in the Viking era.  They profoundly influenced the language and gave us many everyday words such as egg, sister, sky and they.  More recently, the global predominance of English has left its mark on Danish.  We can assume that many other languages will similarly have rubbed up against each other in different ways over time.

More families

Worldwide, there are around twenty major language families besides Indo-European, plus quite a few languages such as Korean or Basque, which do not appear to have relatives.  Attempts have been made to show that some of these families are, in fact, related.  For example, the intriguing Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis posits  that there is a link between a now almost extinct group of languages spoken in Russian Siberia and some languages of North America.  The American linguist Joseph Greenberg wrote in the 1980s trying to link all the world’s languages.  Although I find what he says is tantalising and has a great deal of merit, others would argue that he overworked chance resemblances between words which would have changed much more over the deep time frames we are talking about.

So which is the oldest language family?

There is no way of knowing which the oldest language family is.   There is no evidence for how people spoke tens of millennia ago, or even when modern language started. There are, logically, four possibilities.  Firstly, there was one language to start with, and that diverged into the language families we know today, and that they have now all changed so much from the original that we cannot see their common origin.  Secondly, speech evolved independently in several different places at various times, leading to today’s language families.  Thirdly, that language may have evolved independently in several places, but that there is now only one extant branch and that the others died off.  A fourth possibility is that language evolved independently in different places, but history mixed populations up and created a language cocktail; however, this doesn’t fit what we know about how a group of people move from speaking a language to adopting a new one.  As you can see, it’s impossible to say which the oldest language is and anyone who tells you differently is probably speaking from a point of view of understandable pride in their language.  Why not explore languages further with Lingua Learn UK?

About your blogger

Hello, I’m Tim – head of Lingua Learn UK.  I have been involved in languages teaching for over thirty years, principally in French, German and Spanish.  At Lingua Learn UK, I co-ordinate native speaker teachers of 14 languages, all university graduates and qualified teachers like me.