Which is the oldest language in the world

Spoken words don't leave a physical footstep on the world, so taking the origins of human language can be a tricky business. Language is also in a constant state of flux, with words and their meaning transforming and changing with every generation. As such, it would be missing the point to single out one language as the oldest in the world. That said, there are a number of Advertisement Hebrew Hebrew is the sacred language of Jewish scripture that's over 3,000 years old, with early forms By around 400 CE, Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language and it very nearly became a dead language. However, the rise of Zionism in the modern era ensured a resurgence of the language and it’s now spoken by nine million people, most notably in Israel where it’s the official language. Advertisement It’s still spoken today in some form, although primarily by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies. It’s estimated that less than 1 percent of Indians can speak the language, with just 14,000 people describing it as their primary language. Its legacy lives on, however. Sanskrit belongs to a broad family known as the Indo-European languages, meaning it has clear connections to English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and many other languages widely spoken in Europe. Tamil Around 80 million still people speak Tamil as a day-to-day language, which is pretty impressive considering that the earliest Tamil literature – Tolkāppiyam – has been dated to 300 BCE. It’s primarily spoken in Sr...

The earliest written languages on the record are known to be the ‘cuneiform script’ found in Mesopotamia, dating back to the 8th millennium BC. Now, there are approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Many research scholars find it almost impossible to determine which language is the earliest or oldest. A few languages backed with rare linguistic families and cultures, taking their early roots from thousands of years ago. Since many languages existed for hundreds of years, a variety of rare and common language families can be considered and put to the list of world’s oldest languages recorded officially. A few of them are indeed extinct; a few others still exist and are used for only specific purposes. Whereas, some more continue to exist in use, although a significant decrease in the number of speakers is counted. Linguists claim that the age of a language must be calculated by its first time appearance in texts and with its present use. The following list includes the world’s 10 oldest languages documented in history: Top 10 Oldest Languages of the World 1. Chinese: Chinese is known to be one of the oldest languages (3000 years) to have appeared with its first script that is estimated to be around 1250 BC. The demand for . 2. Latin: Following the Old form, Latin made its entry as the first script dated approximately in 75 BC. This is a classical language that branches from the Italic family of the Indo-European groups. Initially, Latin was being used as a spoken la...

There are currently around 6,000 different languages spoken around the world. Using statistical techniques to analyse the rate at which words and dialects mutate, it has been calculated that it would have taken at least 100,000 years for a single language to have diversified that much. That would take us back to the middle of the Stone Age, around the time that Homo sapiens first emerged as a species. It’s possible that earlier human species such as Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 years ago) or even Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) had language, but the evidence for this is much weaker. If language evolved before the human migration from Africa, 120,000 to 150,000 years ago, it is possible that all the languages spoken today have evolved from a single root language, in the same way that all humans alive today have a common maternal ancestor. But even if this is true, we have no way of knowing if there were other, older languages in use at the time of that migration that have subsequently died out. There have been several attempts to trace the family tree of our languages and find ancestral vocabulary and grammar. In 1994, Stanford University linguist Merritt Ruhlen suggested several root words that may have belonged to this ancestor language, including ‘ku’ (‘who’), and ‘ma’ (‘what’). But this is still controversial and many linguists regard the search for a ‘first’ language as pointless.

These Are the World's Oldest Languages Still Spoken Today Linguists frequently debate the origins of language, aided by anthropologists and biologists in trying to determine just when, why, and how humans began to communicate verbally—estimates range from 50,000 to 2 million years ago. But no matter when speech evolved, language has become the defining … HuffPost - Caroline Bologna • 10h "Ever put your kid to bed and realize an hour later you’re still watching SpongeBob?" Kids may say the darndest things, but parents tweet about them in the funniest ways. Every week, we round up the most hilarious quips from parents on Twitter to spread the joy. Scroll down to read the latest batch, … Al Jazeera • 12h Media network’s film, India … Who Lit the Fuse?, investigates hate crimes by Hindu nationalist groups against Muslims. A court in India has restrained Al Jazeera from broadcasting an investigative film on hate crimes against Muslims by Hindu supremacist groups in the country. The Allahabad High Court …

Spoken words don't leave a physical footstep on the world, so taking the origins of human language can be a tricky business. Language is also in a constant state of flux, with words and their meaning transforming and changing with every generation. As such, it would be missing the point to single out one language as the oldest in the world. That said, there are a number of Advertisement Hebrew Hebrew is the sacred language of Jewish scripture that's over 3,000 years old, with early forms By around 400 CE, Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language and it very nearly became a dead language. However, the rise of Zionism in the modern era ensured a resurgence of the language and it’s now spoken by nine million people, most notably in Israel where it’s the official language. Advertisement It’s still spoken today in some form, although primarily by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies. It’s estimated that less than 1 percent of Indians can speak the language, with just 14,000 people describing it as their primary language. Its legacy lives on, however. Sanskrit belongs to a broad family known as the Indo-European languages, meaning it has clear connections to English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and many other languages widely spoken in Europe. Tamil Around 80 million still people speak Tamil as a day-to-day language, which is pretty impressive considering that the earliest Tamil literature – Tolkāppiyam – has been dated to 300 BCE. It’s primarily spoken in Sr...

The earliest written languages on the record are known to be the ‘cuneiform script’ found in Mesopotamia, dating back to the 8th millennium BC. Now, there are approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Many research scholars find it almost impossible to determine which language is the earliest or oldest. A few languages backed with rare linguistic families and cultures, taking their early roots from thousands of years ago. Since many languages existed for hundreds of years, a variety of rare and common language families can be considered and put to the list of world’s oldest languages recorded officially. A few of them are indeed extinct; a few others still exist and are used for only specific purposes. Whereas, some more continue to exist in use, although a significant decrease in the number of speakers is counted. Linguists claim that the age of a language must be calculated by its first time appearance in texts and with its present use. The following list includes the world’s 10 oldest languages documented in history: Top 10 Oldest Languages of the World 1. Chinese: Chinese is known to be one of the oldest languages (3000 years) to have appeared with its first script that is estimated to be around 1250 BC. The demand for . 2. Latin: Following the Old form, Latin made its entry as the first script dated approximately in 75 BC. This is a classical language that branches from the Italic family of the Indo-European groups. Initially, Latin was being used as a spoken la...

There are currently around 6,000 different languages spoken around the world. Using statistical techniques to analyse the rate at which words and dialects mutate, it has been calculated that it would have taken at least 100,000 years for a single language to have diversified that much. That would take us back to the middle of the Stone Age, around the time that Homo sapiens first emerged as a species. It’s possible that earlier human species such as Homo heidelbergensis (600,000 years ago) or even Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) had language, but the evidence for this is much weaker. If language evolved before the human migration from Africa, 120,000 to 150,000 years ago, it is possible that all the languages spoken today have evolved from a single root language, in the same way that all humans alive today have a common maternal ancestor. But even if this is true, we have no way of knowing if there were other, older languages in use at the time of that migration that have subsequently died out. There have been several attempts to trace the family tree of our languages and find ancestral vocabulary and grammar. In 1994, Stanford University linguist Merritt Ruhlen suggested several root words that may have belonged to this ancestor language, including ‘ku’ (‘who’), and ‘ma’ (‘what’). But this is still controversial and many linguists regard the search for a ‘first’ language as pointless.

These Are the World's Oldest Languages Still Spoken Today Linguists frequently debate the origins of language, aided by anthropologists and biologists in trying to determine just when, why, and how humans began to communicate verbally—estimates range from 50,000 to 2 million years ago. But no matter when speech evolved, language has become the defining … HuffPost - Caroline Bologna • 14h "Ever put your kid to bed and realize an hour later you’re still watching SpongeBob?" Kids may say the darndest things, but parents tweet about them in the funniest ways. Every week, we round up the most hilarious quips from parents on Twitter to spread the joy. Scroll down to read the latest batch, … Al Jazeera • 17h Media network’s film, India … Who Lit the Fuse?, investigates hate crimes by Hindu nationalist groups against Muslims. A court in India has restrained Al Jazeera from broadcasting an investigative film on hate crimes against Muslims by Hindu supremacist groups in the country. The Allahabad High Court …