10 Oldest Languages in the World
I’ve seen lots of listicles like this before and most of them are just a bunch of baseless nonsense along the lines of “lithuanian is a conservative european language so it’s really old” and “welsh hasn’t changed in the past few thousand years”. These are clearly bad metrics. I think the closest to a decent metric for “oldest language” is what currently surviving languages’ ancestor appears earliest in the historical record (or rather, which languages appearing in writing early on have surviving descendants). Under that metric, I think the following would be the oldest languages (or rather language families):
0? Coptic: this is a bit iffy because it’s only surviving liturgically but it descends from Ancient Egyptian which first appears in writing ~4700 years ago 1? Greek: this one’s also a bit iffy because it depends on how closely related you consider Mycenaean Greek (first attested ~3500 years ago) and Modern Greek. Otherwise, Greek becomes attested ~2800 years ago when the Greek alphabet gets adopted which would bump this down to 4th place 2 Chinese: the Chinese languages first appeared in Old Chinese in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions ~3200 years ago 3= Aramaic: this first appears ~3000 years ago and is ancestral to the languages of a few small communities in the Levant and several liturgical languages in the same region. 3= Hebrew: a calendar that seems to be in a very early stage of Hebrew written with a script much more similar to the Phoenician script than modern Hebrew (which instead is based on a stylised Aramaic script and appears to have been adopted during the Babylonian exile) appeared ~3000 years ago 5? Arabic: this one’s iffy too. There are Old North Arabian inscriptions starting ~2700 years ago but it’s not entirely clear exactly how these inscriptions relate to Old Arabic (and therefore are ancestral to Modern Arabic). Otherwise, Old Arabic is certainly attested ~2000 years ago so maybe bumping it down to 10th place 6 Romance: Latin is ancestral to the modern Romance languages and it first appears in writing ~2600 years ago 7 Persian: Old Persian is first written ~2500 years ago and, despite the substantial phonological change since then, it does appear to be ancestral to the Modern Persian/Farsi, Dari, and Tajik languages. 8 Indo-Aryan: apparently Prakrit inscriptions, particularly the edicts of Ashoka ~2260 years ago, actually seem to predate Sanskrit inscriptions (although many Sanskrit texts are clearly composed in a old form of the language as part of an oral tradition predating these Prakrit inscriptions). I can’t find a good source about which Prakrit these edicts are written in, but the Middle Indo-Aryan languages are, collectively, ancestral to the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India, Eastern Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka (and small populations in neighbouring countries) 9 Tamil: Old Tamil is first attested in cave inscriptions and potshards ~2200 years ago 10? Northwestern Iranian: the classification of the Iranian languages is still very much an open question, but Parthian is usually considered Northwestern but the relationship between this and the (multiple) Northwestern groups within the surviving Iranian languages (including Kurdish and a variety of other small languages) so whether this one counts is very iffy; Parthian is attested from ~2000 years ago so, if it counts as an ancestor to the modern Northwestern Iranian languages, that’s their earliest attestation 10? Scandinavian: a short inscription appears ~1800 years ago usually explained as Proto-Norse, but it could reasonably be interpreted as Proto-Germanic instead so this inscription (and other, slightly later ones) are certainly ancestral to the Scandinavian languages, and possibly the other Germanic languages (e.g. German, Dutch, English, or Frisian) as well 10? Mayan: a stela from Tikal contains an inscription in a Mayan language from ~1700 years ago 10? Ge’ez: this is iffy because, like Coptic, it’s only used liturgically these days, but it’s first attested from ~1650 years ago and, whilst related to Tigrinya and Tigre, it does not seem to be an ancestor of them so it’s only here as a liturgical language and not because of the modern Northern Ethiosemitic languages 10? Cham: this Austronesian language of southern Vietnam related to Malay and Balinese first appears in an inscription commemorating a king carved ~1650 years ago
