What was the global language spoken before the Tower of Babel?

Question

After the curse, God confused the people by making them not understand one another. There must have been only one language prior?

Answer 1

Assuming this biblical account is literal and not figurative, it would be nearly impossible to track all of the worlds languages back to one single one.

There are two main ways that historical linguists study ancient languages: using writing systems to trace older forms of language use or using neighboring languages to contrast and compare in hopes of finding likely root forms of words. Both of these would seem inneffective in tracing all of the languages used today back to a single ancestor.

The first method, that is writing, is inneffective because if the events at Babel did literally occur they would have predated the creation of the first two writing systems by the Summerians and the Chinese. Without some form of preserved written language it becomes difficult to claim there was only one language.

The second form becomes difficult as well because linguists have pretty much traced languages as far back as possible with the information we have now. The world is divided up into language families but, to the best of my knowledge, no evidence has shown that these language families are all from one particular root language. Again, if the account of Babel is literal, the languages the people spoke would have been newly created, unintelligable languages not new branches off of one single old language.

If the events of Babel did literally occur, it is likely that the original language is either gone forever, erased by the confusion of languages or is one of the original languages that developed into one of our modern day language groups. If the latter is the case it would still be difficult to determine which of our language groups was the original language of pre-Babel humanity.

Basically, I think its unlikely that we will ever really know what it was.

Answer 2

People spoke via their hearts. Hebrew is a Semitic language and as any such member of the higher Afro-Asiatic phylum. Within Semitic, the Northwest Semitic languages shaped across the third millennium BCE, grouped with the Arabic languages as Central Semitic. The Canaanite languages are a organization inside Northwest Semitic, rising within the 2d millennium BCE within the Levant, step by step setting apart from Aramaic and Ugaritic. Within the Canaanite organization, Hebrew belongs to the sub-organization additionally containing Edomite, Ammonite and Moabite. Another Canaanite sub-organization includes Phoenician and its descendant Punic.

Answer 3

There never has been a single language and new languages are developing today. The Tower of Babel story is a myth. Anyone who has studied languages and linguistics will tell you that.

Answer 4

There was never a global language, the story is fiction.

Answer 5

Hebrew