Oldest Language in the World

Picking up one language from thousands and naming it as the oldest language in the world is not a piece of cake. You have to research extensively and look at the history of mankind to understand where it all began. The human civilization is a vintage factor and in recent times languages have reduced from millions to thousands and then to a few hundreds. But people still speak some of the oldest languages in the world.

All living beings communicate with each other, but only we humans are capable of communicating with each other by speech and by the use of different languages. The communication of animals is not that sophisticated and developed as verbal communication of humans. We all use millions of words daily, but have you ever wondered where did all these words came from. The most interesting thing about knowing and learning different languages is, it seems that they existed even before the birth of human civilization.

Which is the Oldest Language in the World

This is a tricky question and trust me even the answer is not that simple. Historians believe that languages must have originated some 3000 and 10,000 years ago, but this is just an assumption, as there is no strong evidence to prove it. Historians are yet to find why the need of languages arrived in the first place. Some say that it was an evolutionary process, as broken rough words were made into languages to understand and adapt to your nearby surroundings. To figure out the oldest language in the world, we first have to know which was the oldest civilization in the world. Did the Aryans came first, was it the Europeans or Dravidian people? No one can pass a clear judgment on this as every one claims that they were the first ones who step foot on our home planet. According to researchers, in the beginning man was a lone animal who later formed groups and hunted for food. This is actually were the need of communication was required. Also scroll through which is the hardest language to learn to gain some more information over it.

The topic of world's oldest language is under a lot of debate, as there are many contenders for this title. From Asia there are Sanskrit, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil. From west there are Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Old Irish, Gothic and Lithuanian. Scriptures older than 5000 years have been found written in Sanskrit and Tamil and the most famous book of all The Holy Bible was first written in Hebrew. So this makes it quite confusing to determine the oldest language in the world. But there is one fact, these languages have influenced each other in some or the other way. Language is never constant and it undergoes daily change with new phrases and words coming in existence. So the rough words and sounds that was made by ancient man developed into soft sophisticated words which we use today.

Let's take every country in this world into consideration and imagine the various languages spoken. You wouldn't even know where to start. According to a recent survey there are about 6000 languages which exist today, this number also includes the various tribal languages spoken on various islands. Numbers show that there are about 200 languages spoken by a million people and there are also some which are spoken by less than 15 people. Such languages are on the verge of extinction. Well if you want to know the world's most spoken language, then it's Mandarin Chinese which is spoken by more than a billion speakers. The second place is bagged by English language with over 485 million speakers. The top ten list of the world's most spoken languages are:

Mandarin Chinese

English

Spanish

Russian

French

Hindi

Arabic

Portuguese

Bengali

Japanese

I hope this article has helped you make an assumption on the oldest language in the world. Also I would ask the readers of Buzzle, to leave their valuable feedback about this topic.