what is the oldest language in the world?

Answer 1

It all depends on what you mean by oldest language

1) Note that LIVING languages, such as those we use for day-to-day communication, are ALWAYS changing, but generally do so gradually, so that they maintain a connection with the past. Thus, for instance, we speak of "English" of the 8th century A.D. and of today, recognizing their organic connection. Yet in what sense are they "the same language"?

Looking at it this way, the question is almost impossible to answer, because we might take ANY language back generation by generation through the millenia.

2) Perhaps you are interested in the oldest SPOKEN language, that is, language which is still used today in essentially the same form as long ago. As noted above, this really does not happen with daily living languages. But some are preserved (or revived) for SPECIAL use. Best example of this is liturgical languages. By this measure, we would haveto go with "Classical Sanskrit" of the first millenium B.C., which is still used for liturgical purposes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

3) Finally, if you want to know about the most ancient WRITTEN language, that is, the language for which we have found the most ancient decipherable evidence, most would answer the Sumerian language of lower Mesopotamia, for which we have writings from perhaps 3400 or 3500 B.C. This culture is credited with first inventing a system of writing (at least the oldest one to survive).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer#Language_and_writing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script

But ancient Egyptian writings have also been recovered from the 4th millenium B.C., and some have argued that certain ones might predate the Sumerian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/16/MN229801.DTL

Answer 2

Tolkappiyam is dated between 300 and 800BC. There are several other written records of language that pre date Tolkappiyam. Hieroglyphics in Egypt date back several thousand years, so do the inscriptions in the cuneiform script of the Sumerian civilization, as far back as 3400-5000BC. If you mean to say that Tamil is the oldest language 'still' spoken (as opposed to extinct), we would have to consider a popular analogy- suppose a ship sailed out from a port. A few days later the sail got torn so it had to be changed, later the hull started disintegrating so it was also changed, a few more days later the cabin too started deteriorating and had to be pulled down and a new one was built. In this manner within a year the entire ship had been completely changed; not a single part of it remained the same. So finally the ship returned to the port after a year. Can the ship that arrived at the port be called the same ship that sailed out from the port? In the same manner the Tamil language spoken today is so greatly removed from the Tamil of two thousand and five hundred years ago that the two versions of Tamil are completely unintelligible to each other- would they still be called the same language? Or was the Tamil of the Tolkappiyam era a different language, a proto-Dravidian parent language from which the modern dialects of Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and modern Tamil gradually diverged? Even if we accept that both these 'Tamils' are in fact one language, then the Chinese language, with its written records that dates back to 6600BC (in the form of pictographic inscriptions in the Jiahu script) would be the oldest 'living' language, pre dating Tamil by several **milleniums**!

Answer 3

The oldest language which can be attached to a time period is Sanskrit, BUT Basque has unknown origins, and it may well stretch back several thousand years earlier.
The oldest language with an alphabet is the Semetic languages- namely Hebrew and Aramaic

Answer 4

Sign language

Answer 5

Sanskrit is the oldest spoken language in the world.

I'll save the trouble of reading a copy and paste so go here and read all about it if you're needing it for a class or something.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

Answer 6

It is impossible to tell, there are many theories to the origin of language but so far i haven't read any thing concrete on the oldest language. the eailiest ,found fully developed , written lang. found is cuneiform script which emerged in ancient mesopotamia in city of babylon

Answer 7

Sign language, body language, and different grunts would be my guess.

But it all depends on how you define "language", and depending on what criteria are used to determine the "age" of a language.

See the first link below, please.

See link two for some interesting ideas on the origin of language.

Answer 8

Sanskrit

Answer 9

Sign language with the cave man.

Answer 10

the language of lurrrrrrv