There is no definitive answer to the question of which language is the oldest still in use, as languages do not have fixed birth or death dates and undergo significant changes over time. For example, Portuguese derives from Latin, and it is impossible to establish an exact date for the transition from one language to another. Similarly, an American speaker would have difficulty understanding 11th-century English, even if it were theoretically the same language.
Fundamentals of Determining Antiquity
The most accurate assessments are based on written records, as a language may have been used for millennia before it began to be written down.
Main Contenders for the Title
One strong candidate is the Tamil language, spoken by nearly 90 million people in South India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. The earliest written evidence of this language dates back to 2300 years ago. Although modern Tamil has undergone changes, it retains similarities with texts from ancient literature, which often allows it to hold this position.
Other languages, such as Greek, appeared 3,500 years ago, and the earliest records of Chinese date back 3,200 years, making them older than Tamil. However, modern versions of these languages differ greatly from the ancient forms used in Greece (14 million speakers) and China (1.4 billion speakers, including variants).
Historical and Religious Languages
The Hebrew language has an interesting chronology: its earliest records date back to the 10th century BCE. Nevertheless, between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, it fell out of everyday use, becoming exclusively religious. In the 19th century, a widespread movement contributed to the 'revival' of the language in its modern form, which is currently used by about 10 million people in Israel.
The Semitic language Aramaic, a relative of Hebrew, was used for at least three thousand years and was the language of Jesus Christ. Today, about a million people continue to speak Aramaic, primarily members of the Assyrian ethnic group in countries such as Iraq, Syria, and the USA.
Ancient and Isolated Languages
Ancient Egyptian, the language spoken by the pharaohs, was one of the most important and best-documented languages of Antiquity. It went through many phases and partially survived through the Coptic language, which is considered the last stage of this language. Coptic emerged around the 3rd century CE. Currently, there are no native speakers, as 120 million Egyptians speak a variant of Arabic; however, the language maintains liturgical use in the Coptic Catholic and Coptic Orthodox Churches, prompting some priests to study its reading and writing, much like Latin remains in the Roman Catholic Church.
Another candidate is the Basque language, spoken by 800,000 people in the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain. This is an isolated language with no known relatives, the only one of its kind in Europe. The exact time of its existence and origin are unknown, but the most common hypothesis suggests that it might be the last surviving language spoken on the continent before the arrival of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who gave rise to the vast Indo-European language family, including Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic languages, as well as the Persian language of Iran and Hindi of India. If so, this mysterious language could have existed for more than five thousand years.