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There is always the temptation to consider the tribal languages of the remotest mountain tribes.
However, looking at languages that have a literary past and present and searching their literary works would lead us to conclude that the designation of "Oldest Language" should be assigned to [[Tamil]]
Not only did the first Sangam span a few thousand years before that, but what about all the millennia before the literary associations were even formed?▼
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The frequently asked question of what is the world's '''oldest language''' is one that admits of several answers, depending on what criteria are used to determine the "age" of a language.
Linguists agree that there are no such things as "primitive" languages: no human language has a "rudimentary" gramar or a vocabulary unequal to the task of talking about the things its speakers want to discuss. [[Noam Chomsky]] and his followers believe that all human languages possess a common deep structure; those structures are shared by all human languages, whatever their superficial differences.
Moreover, all languages are subject to processes of [[language change]]. Languages change inevitably in their vocabulary and phonology as old speakers die and are replaced by younger ones. Some linguists have hypothesized that this process is inevitable; linguistic drift, like [[genetic drift]], could be used to set up a time framework. If linguistic change is inevitable, some have put forth the theory that there might exist a curtain in time behind which the relationships between languages, even if valid, are irrecoverable.
==Comparative linguistics==
A highly controversial proposal put forth by a number of [[comparative linguistics|comparative linguists]] such as [[Joseph Greenberg]] and [[Merritt Ruhlen]] proposes that all human languages descend from a single common ancestor, the "[[Proto-World language]]".
If this hypothesis is accepted, one possible criterion for selecting a candidate for the oldest language would be through the use of [[cladistics]]: the languages that appear to have broken from the common stock earliest would be oldest. Under this criterion, most exponents of this hypothesis give pride of place to the [[Khoi-San languages]], spoken in Africa. Believers here also tend to accept the [[single-origin hypothesis]] for [[human]]s, and look to that hypothesis about human genetic distance for confirmation of their linguistic speculations.
As noted, this hypothesis remains quite controversial. Some linguists object to their methods, whinc typically revolve around [[mass lexical comparison]], the comparison of vocabulary in bulk. Instead, they are not convinced except by evidence coming from the [[comparative method]], which requires the reconstruction of forms in a [[protolanguage]] and the development of a regular set of sound change rules. As mentioned above, some linguists do not believe that linguistic comparison has enough depth of field to be able to reliably see relationships that may have existed in the past, and holds that even if they might have existed they are now irrecoverable.
The languages into which the comparative method has delved most deeply are the [[Indo-European langauges]], but this may be a function of the fact that comparative linguistics began with Indo-European studies. It remains the case that [[Proto-Indo-European]] is the most extensively studied reconstructed protolanguage, and as such may qualify as the oldest language by this criterion. Proto-Indo-European, though, is an academic construct.
==Language isolates==
[[Language isolate]]s, with only speculative or unknown relationships to the languages spoken in the areas surrounding them, are often presumed to be older than the surrounding languages; it is thought that the more widespread and related languages were introduced more recently. The [[Basque language]] is often thought to be very old for this reason.
==Written languages and literatures==
Another criterion for determining which is the world's oldest language would be to examine the depth of its written records.
By this criteria, most [[archaeology|archaeologists]] concur that [[Sumerian language|Sumerian]] is the world's oldest language; it is extant from close to [[4000 BC]]. The [[Egyptian hieroglyph|hieroglyphs]] of [[Egyptian language|Egyptian]] are close to Sumerian in age.
The oldest language with a continuous written tradition is [[Chinese language|Chinese]]; the [[oracle script]] seems to be related to the [[seal script]]s of early Chinese, and is attested from around [[1200 BC]], and therefore the descendants of that script are still in use. Written [[Phoenician language|Phoenician]] and [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] trace back to around [[1000 BC]], and a descendent of the original form of the [[Hebrew alphabet]] is preserved to write [[Samaritan Hebrew]] religious texts.
Languages with very old literatures include [[Sanskrit]] and [[Tamil]]; it has been suggested that the earliest poems of the [[Veda]]s date to around [[1200 BC]], though they were preserved by [[oral transmission]] well before they were written down. The antiquity of the texts of the [[Hebrew Bible]] is a controversial subject; some religious believers accept the literal truth of statements that would have the earliest portions of the text written by [[Moses]], which would put them before [[1270 BC]]. The poems of [[Homer]] are dated by [[Herodotus]] to approximately [[850 BC]].
==References==
*Ruhlen, Merritt, ''The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue'' (Wiley, 1996) ISBN 0471159638
*Coulmas, Florian, ''The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems'' (Blackwell, 1999) ISBN 063121481X
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