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What’s the world’s oldest language?

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Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#91

This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed. Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer). Oldest written language? Sumerian…

You could arguably claim that Hebrew never ceased to be a spoken language, although it was not a vernacular.

Hebrew never ceased to be used in liturgy and in religious studies - the same situation also holds true for Coptic, so the oldest written language still spoken (in religious capacity only) is Coptic.

But Hebrew was also used as a lingua franca between different Jewish communities all over the world. This was not a minor role, and it had quite an economic impact on forming long-range trade networks across Jewish communities.

Now there are more things people might love to argue about, such as when we can really define a script as "writing" and how do we deal with undeciphered scripts. So one can try to discredit Proto-Canaanite inscriptions like Wadi el-Hol or claim that ancient Chinese pottery symbols that are precursor to Oracle bone script are actually related. The evidence seems to be stronger on the Hebrew side, but it's very easy to derail this kind of argument just to score national pride points.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#92
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that Chinese is a group of languages, so when you mention it do you mean Mandarin and Cantonese both?

Yes, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, etc., as they're all derived from Old Chinese and share its script.

At the point of the oldest Chinese writing, people spoke Old Chinese. But it's safe to assume old Chinese had dialects as well, and maybe some of them were quite mutually unintelligible enough to be considered different languages.

Re: What’s the world’s oldest language?

#93

This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed. Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer). Oldest written language? Sumerian…

> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.

Most languages have naturally evolved as far back as we can track them through history, and beyond that we just don't know. As far as we know, most languages could just go back to one Ur-Tongue (sometimes called Proto-World).

But some spoken languages are newer and we can prove that. The youngest language in the world is arguably the Nicaraguan Sign Language[1], from the early 1980s. The only possible progenitors are home sign systems the kids who developed it used at home, which were not full languages and were themselves quite new, so it's got a pretty strong claim.

Beyond that you've got pidgins, creoles and mixed languages which develop by combining two or more languages. You can argue whether or not their entirely new, since they generally borrow vocabulary from one language and grammar from the another, or just mix several languages more freely together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

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