What is the oldest language that is still in use today?
Greek has a documented history of 3,400 years, the longest of any single natural language in the Indo-European language family. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, with fragmentary records in Mycenaean dating back to the 15th or 14th century BC, making it the world’s oldest recorded living language. Today, it is spoken by approximately 17–25 million people in Greece (official), Cyprus (official), Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and emigrant communities around the world, including Australia, United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere. Greek has been written in the Greek alphabet (the oldest continuously used alphabet, and the first to introduce vowels) since the 9th century BC in Greece (before that in Linear B), and the 4th century BC in Cyprus (before that in Cypriot syllabary). Greek literature has a continuous history of nearly three
Tamil is the oldest living language of India and the world. It belongs to the Dravidian group of languages. Tamil is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu, and also has official status in Sri Lanka and Singapore. Tamil ranks 17th amongst the top twenty of the world’s most spoken languages. Tamil has a literary tradition of over two thousand years. Tolkappiyam, the oldest known literary work in Tamil, has been dated variously between second century BC and fifth century AD.
But a new genetic study underlines the extreme antiquity of a special group of languages, raising the possibility that their distinctive feature was part of the ancestral human mother tongue. They are the click languages of southern Africa. About 30 survive, spoken by peoples like the San, traditional hunters and gatherers, and the Khwe, who include hunters and herders. the Ju|’hoansis’ line of descent is so ancient that it goes back close to the very root of the human family tree. There are reasons to assume that the click languages may be very old. One is that the click speakers themselves, particularly a group of hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, belong to an extremely ancient genetic lineage, according to analysis of their DNA. They are called the Ju|’hoansi, with the upright bar indicating a click. (”Ju|’hoansi” is pronounced like ”ju-twansi” except that the ”tw” is a click sound like the ”tsk, tsk” of disapproval.) It would seem that this is one of the earliest forms of l
G R E E K has a D O C U M E N T E D history of 3,400 years, the longest of any single natural language in the Indo-European language family. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, with fragmentary records in Mycenaean dating back to the 15th or 14th century BC, making it THE WORLD’S OLDEST RECORDED LIVING LANGUAGE. Today, it is spoken by approximately 17–25 million people in Greece (official), Cyprus (official), Albania, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Italy, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and emigrant communities around the world, including Australia, United States, Canada, Germany and elsewhere.
