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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

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 (extinct) or Egyptian (not extinct, despite what the article states). Oldest written language still in use? Coptic, a direct descendant of Egyptian used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church, but not spoken as a vernacular for centuries. Oldest written language still spoken? Hebrew (originally Canaanite), in continuous use but not as a vernacular for about 2000 years. Oldest written language continuously spoken: Greek, but it wasn't continuously written. (There was a gap between Linear B and alphabetic script.) Oldest continuously spoken and written language: Chinese.

celeritascelery 3y ago
> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old. That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.
- DonaldFisk 3y ago
  OK, excluding constructed languages such as Esperanto.
  - solumunus 3y ago
    “All spoken languages are equally old” but then in the next point: Welsh is older than English. You must have miscommunicated here? Obviously all spoken languages are not “equally old”…
    - heywhatupboys 3y ago
      are humans older than chimps? no, we share a common ancestor. Have chimps been in x country for longer than humans? maybe not the same question
    - DonaldFisk 3y ago
      Older = spoken earlier. A direct ancestor of Welsh was spoken earlier than a direct ancestor of English in Great Britain, but as both languages are direct descendants of Proto-Indo-European, they are equally old somewhere.
      - vikramkr 3y ago
        But there's an added wrinkle of which language (either spoken or written) stays mutually intelligible with the current variant for the furthest amount of time back. And tons of languages exist that are Creoles and formed from pidgins and essentially came into existence during the recent colonial era. And events like the massive flood of French vocab into English create some discontinuities in intelligibility over time. Evolution of any sort tends to not be a smooth linear process
- civilitty 3y ago
  Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language. Since spoken language significantly predates written language, we’ll never know when the former originated. It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language. The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.
    - heywhatupboys 3y ago
      English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.
      - triceratops 3y ago
        > English and Hebrew are equally old. If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
        earthboundkid 3y ago
        In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)
        triceratops 3y ago
        If I offered 100 pieces of gold I bet I could find at least one Hebrew speaker in Judaea in the year 1. Would I find an English speaker if I then popped over to Britannia and offered gold? Or would they say "What the fuck is English?"
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Languages aren't concrete things. They are historical chains of interacting cause and effect where a person learns to speak from a community then joins the community and in so doing propagates the language to others. Asking about the "age" of a language doesn't really make any sense, except for constructed languages like Esperanto, and even those aren't really denovo because they inevitably are created by people who already spoke another language. A better question is what language has the longest period of mutual comprehensibility, e.g. if you took a speaker from time A to time B. As an English speaker, I could talk to Shakespeare with some mild accommodations, but I would have a lot of trouble talking to Chaucer. For written languages, the period of mutual comprehensibility can end up being thousands of years long because people in later generations are trained on the earlier texts, but for spoken languages, things tend to break up after a few hundred years. The best chance for a spoken language to maintain intelligibility is to have some kind of religious community that insists on preserving the old dialect, like Sanskrit (where there is a well preserved canon of pronunciation), Classical Arabic (Quran recitation), Hebrew, Latin, etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- unscaled 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
diego_moita 3y ago
What about languages we can only speculate about? E.g: the several languages of the Khoe-Sān people in South Africa. It is generally assumed that their language is, phonetically, the most "different" in the world and therefore we can suppose that it was one of the first to derive from the hypothetical "proto-language".
- parabyl 3y ago
  Blanking on a source right now, but I recall reading about a study on the 'oldness' of languages and found that the unique sort of phonetics in !Kung and other Khoe or San languages appeared to reduce over time, and simpler hard consonants would emerge in their place - implying that they are indeed some of the oldest languages still around. Interstingly, there are a number of words from these languages that are still widely used in South African slang: Dagga for Marijuana, Eina for "Ouch!", Gogga for Bug or Insect, and Kerrie for Stick, usually used as the neologism Knobkerrie. Very possibly some of the oldest slang in the world!
legends2k 3y ago
References?
rospaya 3y ago
I thought that Chinese is a group of languages, so when you mention it do you mean Mandarin and Cantonese both?
- DonaldFisk 3y ago
  Yes, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, etc., as they're all derived from Old Chinese and share its script.
  - unscaled 3y ago
    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.
unscaled 3y ago
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.

celeritascelery 3y ago

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

DonaldFisk 3y ago
OK, excluding constructed languages such as Esperanto.
- solumunus 3y ago
  “All spoken languages are equally old” but then in the next point: Welsh is older than English. You must have miscommunicated here? Obviously all spoken languages are not “equally old”…
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    are humans older than chimps? no, we share a common ancestor. Have chimps been in x country for longer than humans? maybe not the same question
  - DonaldFisk 3y ago
    Older = spoken earlier. A direct ancestor of Welsh was spoken earlier than a direct ancestor of English in Great Britain, but as both languages are direct descendants of Proto-Indo-European, they are equally old somewhere.
    - vikramkr 3y ago
      But there's an added wrinkle of which language (either spoken or written) stays mutually intelligible with the current variant for the furthest amount of time back. And tons of languages exist that are Creoles and formed from pidgins and essentially came into existence during the recent colonial era. And events like the massive flood of French vocab into English create some discontinuities in intelligibility over time. Evolution of any sort tends to not be a smooth linear process
civilitty 3y ago
Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language. Since spoken language significantly predates written language, we’ll never know when the former originated. It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.
- triceratops 3y ago
  It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language. The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are. There are species with less "evolution" than others.
    - triceratops 3y ago
      > English and Hebrew are equally old. If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?
      - earthboundkid 3y ago
        In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)
        triceratops 3y ago
        If I offered 100 pieces of gold I bet I could find at least one Hebrew speaker in Judaea in the year 1. Would I find an English speaker if I then popped over to Britannia and offered gold? Or would they say "What the fuck is English?"
earthboundkid 3y ago
Languages aren't concrete things. They are historical chains of interacting cause and effect where a person learns to speak from a community then joins the community and in so doing propagates the language to others. Asking about the "age" of a language doesn't really make any sense, except for constructed languages like Esperanto, and even those aren't really denovo because they inevitably are created by people who already spoke another language. A better question is what language has the longest period of mutual comprehensibility, e.g. if you took a speaker from time A to time B. As an English speaker, I could talk to Shakespeare with some mild accommodations, but I would have a lot of trouble talking to Chaucer. For written languages, the period of mutual comprehensibility can end up being thousands of years long because people in later generations are trained on the earlier texts, but for spoken languages, things tend to break up after a few hundred years. The best chance for a spoken language to maintain intelligibility is to have some kind of religious community that insists on preserving the old dialect, like Sanskrit (where there is a well preserved canon of pronunciation), Classical Arabic (Quran recitation), Hebrew, Latin, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
unscaled 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

diego_moita 3y ago

What about languages we can only speculate about? E.g: the several languages of the Khoe-Sān people in South Africa. It is generally assumed that their language is, phonetically, the most "different" in the world and therefore we can suppose that it was one of the first to derive from the hypothetical "proto-language".

parabyl 3y ago
Blanking on a source right now, but I recall reading about a study on the 'oldness' of languages and found that the unique sort of phonetics in !Kung and other Khoe or San languages appeared to reduce over time, and simpler hard consonants would emerge in their place - implying that they are indeed some of the oldest languages still around. Interstingly, there are a number of words from these languages that are still widely used in South African slang: Dagga for Marijuana, Eina for "Ouch!", Gogga for Bug or Insect, and Kerrie for Stick, usually used as the neologism Knobkerrie. Very possibly some of the oldest slang in the world!

legends2k 3y ago

References?

rospaya 3y ago

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

DonaldFisk 3y ago
Yes, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, etc., as they're all derived from Old Chinese and share its script.
- unscaled 3y ago
  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.

unscaled 3y ago

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.