Which is the oldest language in the world?

1. 92

   rajan jollyposted 12 years ago

   Which is the oldest language in the world?

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2. 60

   shwetha123posted 12 years ago

   I will say "Devanagari" is the oldest language of the world. But some people said its Vedic Sanskrit. Still have some doubts in between those two.

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3. 81

   terrektwoposted 12 years ago

   Touched on this previously I think, if you believe the bible then we will most likely never know as during the building of the tower of babel god confounded the languages and made many different. It is possible that he may have allowed some to remain the master language or perhaps it is a lost language and everyone was simply seperated to new languages. Depends what you believe.

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4. 61

   Jonesy0311posted 12 years ago

   My best off-hand guess would be Sumerian as they established the first known human civilization and form of symbol exchange that we would recognize as a language. However, we cannot ignore the fact that both Neanderthal and Cro-magnon man had larger brain cases than modern humans; and were possibly more intelligent. Researchers have sicne decoded some of the Neanderthal genome and discovered the presence of the T-gene, which is believed to be related to language. Well over 100,000 years ago, developing humans possessed voice boxes low enough in the throat to produce sounds similar to those we use today.

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   Borsiaposted 12 years ago

   In reality nobody has a clue.
   The earliest remains found to date put the rise of modern man at around 200 to 300 thousand years ago. They no doubt had some form of a language given that they had the capacity to think and make sounds.
   We also know that Neanderthal lived at the same time as modern man, they even interbred and today roughly 4% of our DNA originated from them, they probably had some form of language as well.
   Modern man was predated by 19 earlier "versions" of man. Some of those probably had some form of a language as well. (Kinda blows the whole Adam and Eve idea out of the water as to being the first people.) Now you are back over 4 million years.
   When people today ask what was the earliest language they tend to forget all of this. But you have to start by defining what you want to accept as a language. These ancients didn't keep written languages but neither do many of today's more primitive cultures, that doesn't mean that they don't have languages.
   There is little if any doubt that by 150,000 years ago people had complex and varied languages and even that is being rather arrogant in saying that languages didn't exist before that time line.
   In all probability they weren't all that different from languages spoken today. The ancients left very little in the way of evidence, humans don't tend to be very good candidates for fossils but we find the occasional bits and pieces and we find tools and other things they used. Sadly they didn't invent the tape recorder so we will never know what it sounded like to live among them.
   But there is no logical reason to think that they didn't have complex and regionally varied languages just as we do today.

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6. 0

   khmohsinposted 12 years ago

   Arabic language is the oldest language of the world.

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7. 60

   Dave Mathewsposted 12 years ago

   If we accept the bible as an authority then one must believe that Hebrew was the first language.

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8. 61

   anemometersposted 12 years ago

   Probably Sumerian but most definitely it would be somewhere in the middle east and a Semitic language

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