Expert: Maria - 4/22/2008

Question
I don't know if this is a stupid question but I was wondering what was the oldest known spoken language??

Answer
Hello,

This is NOT a stupid question at all, but it's very difficult to say what was the first known spoken language in history.

In fact, if we go back to the beginning and examine the origin, evolution  and diversification of human language, we can certainly make a list of several languages, but it’s impossible to say which has been the first.

The only thing I can say  is  that the first well-documented languages were born FIRST in ASIA [see Sumerian cuneiform of the South Mesopotamia (today Iraq) in the 5th millennium BC, and Chinese ideograms in the 4th millennium BC] and in AFRICA at the same time [see Aegyptian hieroglyphs  in the 4th-3th millennium BC],LATER in EUROPE [see Indo-Aryan or Indo-European  language, i.e. an unrecorded prehistoric language from which  nearly all European languages are descended].
In fact the nomadic tribes of the so-called  Indo-Europeans, also known as Aryans [from Sanskrit ‘aryan’ meaning  'noble'], who originally lived  in central Asia  near the Aral Lake, around 2500-2000 BC  migrated to India, Iran and finally  Europe throughout Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, giving rise to the  following modern Indo-European languages, i.e.: Latin and then Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian (Romance Group);  German, English, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish (Germanic group); Greek (Greek group);  Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech (Slavic group);  Albanian (Illyrian group).

So,as far as we know, Sumerian, Egyptian and Chinese are probably the oldest known spoken languages, as they are also the oldest writing systems, while  the first alphabet,i.e. set of  characters, used to represent the phonemic structure of a language was invented by the Phoenicians (around 1200 BC) and then borrowed by  the Greeks and the Romans, so that we use still today the Latin alphabet which derives exactly from the Phoenician letters.

With regard to the origin and evolution of language, this is also a very hard and vexed question still today discussed by  linguists, anthropologists, palaeontologists, ethologists, geneticists, neuroscientists and other scientist who are concerned with this matter.
In fact, scientists say that  language is the very thing that makes us human.  But when did we first start talking and how did language evolve over the millenniums into the diverse form of communication,  it is today a very difficult question.

Hope this can be helpful to you.

Best regards,
Maria