The Oldest Languages Still Being Spoken in the World!

The Oldest Living Languages in the World

There are languages dating back as early as 4500 BCE and as new as a few decades. Now that you have some idea about the history of languages, let's take a look at some of the oldest languages that are still in use today:

• Tamil

  

  Among the official languages of India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, Tamil has been considered a classical language which continues to survive almost in the same form as it did during its inception. The language is a part of the Dravidian language family and is spoken by over 70 million people worldwide.

• Chinese

  

  A part of the Sino-Tibetian language group, Chinese characters date back over 3,000 years and exist in several dialects. It is among the oldest spoken as well as the oldest written languages in the world, with the earliest Chinese inscriptions dating back to around 1250 BCE.

  It is also the single-most spoken language in the world, with more than 1.1 billion speakers. The most popularly spoken Chinese today includes Cantonese and Mandarin, all descending from Old Chinese.

• Farsi

  

  Farsi or Persian is a relatively new language compared to the ones you just read about. However, it is also the longest surviving language dating back to around 550 BC. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian language family, and is still spoken by 110 million people worldwide.

  Persian is also considered an important language in India, being the official language in several Royal households. It has also influenced other languages, including Turkish and Urdu.

• Greek

  

  Dating back to 1450 BCE, Greek has always been the lingua franca of the philosophers, thinkers and mathematicians. It was also the official language of the famed Byzantine Empire. Greek has evolved considerably but is still very similar to the original Ancient Greek, spoken by more than 13 million people in Cyprus and Greece.

• Aramaic

  

  This ancient Syrian language dates back to 11 BCE, making it one of the oldest languages with definite writing records. Infact, the Aramaic letter is the precursor to the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. It exists in several varieties and is still the everyday language of several Armeans, Mizrahi Jews, and Assyrians. Overall, around 1,000,000 people speak variants of Aramaic even today.

• Arabic

  

  Old Arabic goes back to the first century CE, with its modern variant still spoken by more than 420 million people. The language is over 1500 years old, and is the official language of the Islamic holy scripture Quran.

• Basque

  

  Basque existed in Europe long before Europe adapted the Indo-European languages. The only surviving Paleo-European language, Basque is still spoken in parts of France and Spain. It is considered a language isolate and researchers are still trying to discover its exact origins and history.