What is the world's oldest language? Did it originate in the Middleast?

Answer 1

what an interesting question, and one that is yet to be answered...! there are so many possibilities... lets not forget the far east, who also had civilizations far older than many others we take for granted..

Answer 2

The oldest known WRITTEN language did originate in the Middle East. That would be Sumerian, about 5000+ years ago. For SPOKEN languages, to borrow from someone who knows much more than I, all current languages are about 500 or so years old. Spoken languages change so readily (written are much more stable) that after 500 years a language has changed so much it would no longer be intelligible to an earlier speaker. For the first-spoken language, we do not know and probably never will.

Some of these answers really make you wonder. Sanskrit? Sanskrit is an old language. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and like all in that family. is descended from Proto-Indo-European. Seems like Proto-Indo-European would be older, doesn't it?

Hebrew? Arabic? Both Hebrew and Arabic became distinct languages in the Canaanite group somewhere around 2000 BC. But at that time, the Sumerians were already leaving written records, so seems like their language was older still. Phoenician the oldest written? Probably in fourth or fifth place in that race. Sumerian, Elamite, Hittite, and Egyptian (and maybe others) beat it out. Confucius speaks modern Mandarin? No more than you can understand Beowulf in the original.

Tough question, good question. But there is no concrete answer. At least there was no claim that Tamil is the world's oldest language.

Answer 3

Linguists can identify common ancestry among languages, but I'm not sure if we have figured out what the exact origin of all languages was. At any rate, all languages are constantly changing, and no language is the same today as it was before. So in that sense there is no oldest language; they're all continually new.

The writings of Moses teach and Adam and Eve taught their children, so whatever language they spoke was the first human language. They actually lived on the American continent.

Answer 4

Dunno. Some linguists are trying to find "Language One"--the root language for other languages. They haven't been too successful.

Sanskrit is really old, Ancient Egyptian is really old. Hebrew isn't the oldest language.

Since civilization seems to have come from the "Old World"--Africa, Mesopotamia, and Asia all have super-super-old civilizations, I'd definitely think it was from that region.

But the oldest language...wish somebody knew.

Answer 5

The first written language was Phoenician. I would say that that oldest language probably originated in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), but it probably evolved quickly and did not have a written form so that we'll never find it.

- The world's oldest language cannot be Hebrew because that language has been proven to evolve from other Semetic languages.

Answer 6

The oldest language would be difficult to determine; however, some of the oldest must include Egyptian and Sanskrit.

Answer 7

The historical Jesus spoke Aramaic and he lived from about 4bce to about 30ce. But about 500 years before that, Confucius was speaking and writing the same Chinese that is spoken today. Oh, it's changed a little, just as Old English has gradually changed to the way we speak English today. But the language of Confucius is essentially the same language that Chinese are speaking today.

Answer 8

The oldest language that is probably spoken modernly is Hebrew. It is spoken in the state of Israel, so to answer the question "did it originate the middle east?" the answer is yes it did.

Answer 9

Classical Arabic!

Answer 10

Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics is one of the oldest in the world.

Answer 11

Classical Hebrew.