Which Is the Oldest Known Language On Earth?
Spoken language is important. It's one of the most important, and in-demand skills of today. But how did it develop? And where? Spoken words conveying meaning couldn’t have just sprouted up out of anywhere. It must have developed over a long time. Though linguists don’t have an exact date or any idea what the language was or sounded like, it's thought the first spoken language began around 100,000 years ago. Of course, as written language only developed around 5000 years ago, it's hard to pin down anything about these first spoke languages, besides the fact that our own are somehow related to them.
Earth is a big place. In fact, it's so big there are over 6,500 spoken languages between the population of 7 billion. But historically this isn’t many. In fact, many languages are dying out, slowly being replaced with there nation's national language as of better learning and economic opportunities, likely one day to be replaced with the Lingua Franca of the Earth (which at the moment is English). And as there are under 200 nations on earth, many languages are becoming useless in a globally connected world. But, of course, the world wasn’t always globally-connected. In fact, before ‘the modern age’, there were tens of thousands of small nations and communities scattered across the globe. This means there were probably hundreds of thousands of languages, evolving just like living organisms.
These newly evolved apes wandered the landmasses of the planet for thousands of years in small tribes and communities. It's within these groups that language would first be spoken and used as communication in this hunter-gatherer lifestyle that was relied upon since Humans came into existence 200,000 years ago. This communication allowed humans to effectively hunt, multiply, build and craft and survive in harsher conditions such as the higher latitudes of the earth. It also allowed it to out-compete its competitors, like Neanderthals, whom though were smarter and stronger, didn’t group together like Homo-Sapiens, so about 40,000 years ago, they died out. So language is a pretty neat attribute.
After Homo-Sapiens had colonized all of the major landmasses 12,000 years ago, farming began in a few places on earth — mainly ‘Mesopotopia’, ‘China’ and communities in South America. In turn, this led to patriarchy, faster population growth with better chances of survival all leading to development in communication. This happened soonest in Mesopotamia, so by roughly 3500 BC, Sumerian was the first and oldest language that we know of. Interestingly, it had no relatives; like Basque and Japanese, it developed as an isolated language.
Though at this point it was at a ‘proto-literate’ stage, and the first written records were found dating back to 3000 BC. Though that still gives it the title of oldest written language. But Sumerian writing is nothing like today. In fact, it's more akin to Chinese characters. Cuneiform developed around the need to record trade and political information. The first recorded name ever is not of a king or a person of power but is of an accountant. Cuneiform wasn’t an alphabet, it was a collection of pictograms depicting an object or person — like modern-day Chinese and Ancient Egyptian. Despite its almost non-existant similarity to modern Alphabets, it had an unprecedented impact on the development of society in the Western World.
Sumerian culture consisted of several city-states in the South of Mesopotamia such as Uruk (supposedly the first ‘true’ city). But these cities were soon invaded by the more powerful Akkadian powers in the North, and by 2000 BC, Sumerian was reduced to the status of a ‘classical language’ like that of Latin. The Akkadian language that soon overturned Sumerian was a Semitic language, meaning it is a relative of Modern Arabic, Amharic, and Hebrew. Though it lacked the one thing that made Sumerian so famous then and today; its written language. Despite the non-existent relationship between Akkadian and Sumerian, Akkadian rulers took the Sumerian Cuneiform and used is as their own writing system. It was this writing system that caused the development and importance of the written language in the Western World, and the reason we write today.
Though, Sumerian may not, in fact, be the oldest language we know of. It could be one that is spoken by over One-Billion people today. But its heavily debated whether the evidence for this is real. It's possible that the Chinese language could be over 7,000 years old, rather than the measly 5,500 years old that is Sumerian. Markings found in the Gansu province of China are estimated to be early pictograms of Chinese and are estimated by some archeologists to be from 5000 BC. Many archeologists disagree that these are primitive Chinese markings, and much prefer the Universally recognized Chinese characters on Oracle bones and bronze vessels, from 1800 BC rather than 5000 BC.
Despite the age of the Chinese language, even though it's part of the Sino-Tibetan language tree, it's largely isolated and hasn’t influenced Asian culture (besides Japan borrowing its Kanji writing system) as much as Sumerian has Western.
In terms of some of the oldest languages, we know of, besides Sumerian and Chinese, there are several others that have had huge impacts on the World and its cultures. Egyptian developed around the same time as the Sumerian civilization within the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but of course, Egypt developed along the Nile 200 years later than Sumerian. Similarly, its writing system also used pictograms. This language was hugely affected by its neighbors; Ancient Greek ( est. 1900 BC), Persian (est. 400 BC) and Latin (est. 75 BC). Egyptian effectively was a dead language by the time of Roman occupation having been largely replaced with Greek and as of the Egyptian language evolving into Demotic, and later into Coptic with its Christianisation in 400 AD (which is still spoken and written today).
In terms of the oldest language spoken today, Hebrew holds that title. Having been around for over 3,000 years, and barely changing a bit in that time, Hebrew is both a language of ancient and modern times. Arguably, this is only to do with its strong connection to the Jewish religion. From 1000 BC to around 150 BC the language thrived in its native Canaan lands, but with the entry of the Roman Empire, and subduing it under its rule, the Hebrew language was squashed and was replaced by Greek.
But it wasn’t until the Jews were expelled from Israel after a failed revolt in 135 AD that Hebrew ceased to be spoken here, and acted as an underground language for the Jews. This continued until the modern age when the Jews were ‘given back’ their homeland by the British in Palestine which they lost more than 1500 years earlier. As a result of this newfound Israeli nationalism, Hebrew was taken on as the official language in 1948 with the creation of the Jewish state, so remains the oldest language to be spoken today.
In conclusion, we’ll probably never know what the oldest language was, when it developed, or where it came from. Though it is possible that there is evidence somewhere on our planet, buried deep in the earth, under the ocean, or frozen in some ice, for a language much older than Sumerian, Chinese and Hebrew to have existed. It's even possible for a language still to be spoken that is much older than Hebrew, somewhere deep in the Amazon where there is a tribal culture we don’t yet know off. We know so much about language like we do the ocean, but there is much more to be discovered in the understanding of its origin, development, and future. Sumerian could just be the last in a line of a long language family we don’t yet know about.
