Which one is the oldest language from Europe?

Answer 1

David J is correct. But if you are really asking, "What language has the oldest written records in Europe?" then the answer is Greek, whose earliest written records are about 3500 years old. If you are really asking, "What modern European language shows evidence of having been in Europe the earliest?" then the answer is Basque, which cannot be proven to be related to any other modern or ancient language and seems to have been in the area of the Pyrenees since the last Ice Age. All other languages of Europe can be shown to have entered Europe from Asia within the last 10,000 years.

Answer 2

All natural languages are equally old. Any language has developed from an earlier language but there is no cut off point where one language starts and another begins. If one asks which language has been written for longest the answer is Greek. A form of Greek was written three and a bit thousand years ago (the so called Mycenean Greek). If you mean which language spoken today is most similar to the language it developed from longest ago (if you understand what I mean) I think Icelandic might be a candidate if you count it as European. If not 13th century Italian (say Cavalcanti) is not that different from modern Italian though of course it is not the same. Spanish too has not changed that much from the same sort of period. But languages like Basque or Finnish just weren't written as long ago as that.

Answer 3

The point by David J that all natural languages spring from older languages and are therefore equally old is the right one. But if we are talking about languages with the longest recorded history, I think it's Greek. The Greek used 3000 years ago is demonstrably the main origin of the Greek used today, though because of many changes in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary Greeks can barely understand the ancient form (or forms, as there were several dialects).

Wikipedia says the Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian) retain many archaic features which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language, in other words before the emergence of the separate language families including Greek. But the oldest written material in these languages is only from the 16th century.

Outside Europe, texts written in Chinese 2500 years ago are still comprehensible to modern readers, I believe.

Answer 4

According to a BBC article:

Greek is the oldest recorded language of Europe. There are clay tablets, from the second millennium BC, that contain records of trade between continental Greece and Crete.

Answer 5

I would guess Greek but the problem there is that modern Greek and ancient Greek are not alike.

English has elements of old English and ancient languages like that. Finnish (and all finno-ugric) languages are probably the oldest language if you take into accopunt their unique roots.

In short, noone really knows as languages change all the time and intermingle.

Answer 6

Basque is the oldest language in Europe

Answer 7

Finnish is related only to Estonian, Hungarian and some minority languages whose speakers are scattered across the north of Russia. But, Kalevi Wiik argues, Finno-Ugrian languages may originally have been spoken by the whole of northern Europe


There are currently three different major families of languages in Europe: the Indo-Europeans, the Finno-Ugrians and the Basques. The numbers of speakers are highly disproportionate: there are around 700 million speakers of Indo-European languages (about 97 per cent of Europeans), about 22 million Finno-Ugrians (including the Hungarians, Finns and Estonians, 3 per cent of the European total), and about 1.7 million Basques (0.2 per cent).
Relations between the families of languages have long been changing in the sense that the proportion of speakers of Indo-European languages has been growing at the expense of speakers of the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages. The same development has affected the areas in which they are spoken: Indo-European areas have grown while Finno-Ugrian and Basque areas have shrunk. The Indo-European languages have forced the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages into ever more peripheral areas, the Finno-Ugrian languages toward the Arctic Ocean and Basque toward the Pyrenees.
Over the millennia, in other words, the areas in which the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages are spoken have shrunk, with areas favourable to farming been transferred into the hands of speakers of Indo-European languages. The change has probably always taken place (at least largely) in the same way as it does today: speakers of the Finno-Ugrian and Basque languages have gradually changed to Indo-European languages; in the process, the border between the Finno-Ugrian languages and the Indo-European languages has, step by step, moved northwards, while that between the Basque languages and the Indo-European languages has shifted closer and closer to the Pyrenees. This shifting of linguistic borders has not been the result of the moving of populations, or migration. Rather, the history of populations in northern and western Europe has been immobile, based more on cultural and linguistic diffusion than on demic diffusion

Answer 8

I believe it might be impossible to pinpoint one language as the oldest. Spoken language established itself way before they started writing or drawing and there was many European areas where language spread and evolved but also many that where still isolated.

Answer 9

Ancient Greek

Answer 10

I think that language is associated with civilization. It is well known that the first civilization appeared in the region of the South Balkan Peninsula. It is then to be related to Greek as there originate the oldest evidences of civil life.