What is the oldest language in the world?

The oldest language in the world, in writing, is Sumerian, recorded in what is now Iraq from at least 3100 BC, with Egyptian close behind. The oldest written language that is still spoken is usually given as Greek or Chinese, each with more than 3,000 years of records. But those are answers about writing. Spoken language is far older than any record of it, and every language spoken today is the latest stage of something older still, so for speech the question "which is oldest?" has no real answer. This post takes the three questions one at a time.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 6 min read

The short answer

The oldest written language: Sumerian

Writing appeared in two places within a few centuries of each other. Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphs both grew out of earlier systems of marks between 3400 and 3100 BC. Scholars now think the two developed independently, though the question is still argued.

Sumerian is usually called the oldest attested language: it is recorded "dating back to at least 3100 BC, perhaps earlier". The earliest texts are lists and accounts, and some are so bare of grammar that it is disputed whether they record Sumerian at all. Sumerian has no known relatives. It was gradually replaced as a spoken language by Akkadian, and is extinct.

Egyptian is the other candidate, first recorded in hieroglyphs in the late fourth millennium BC. It has the longest written record of any language, "spanning over 5,000 years": its last stage, Coptic, is still used in the liturgy of the Coptic churches, though Arabic long ago replaced it in everyday speech.

The oldest written literature came later than writing itself, about a thousand years later. The first author known by name is Enheduanna, who wrote in Sumerian in the 24th century BC.

The oldest written language still spoken

Here two languages are usually named, and they win on different terms.

Greek has "the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records". Its earliest record is a clay tablet in the Linear B script, from between 1450 and 1350 BC, which makes Greek, in Wikipedia's words, "the world's oldest recorded living language". The Greek of the tablets is far from modern Greek, but the line from one to the other is unbroken.

Chinese is recorded from the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, around 1250 BC: "the first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago". What makes Chinese unusual is the script. The characters of the oracle bones are the ancestors of the characters written today. The spoken language has changed completely in that time, and split into languages that are no longer mutually intelligible: Mandarin, Cantonese and Wu, the family of Shanghainese, among them. How those split is set out in Mandarin vs Cantonese and what Wu Chinese is.

Three more are often mentioned:

• Tamil is "attested since 300 BCE", in inscriptions in a script called Tamil-Brahmi, and has a classical literature of more than two thousand years.
• Hebrew is written from the 10th century BC, but it stopped being anyone's first language some time after 200 AD and was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century: "the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival".
• Basque is often called Europe's oldest language because it is the only one with no known relatives, "the only surviving language of Paleo-European origin". But it was written down much later than Greek, and being unrelated to its neighbours is a different thing from being older than them.

Why "oldest" barely means anything for speech

Writing is about five thousand years old. Speech is far older. Nobody knows exactly how much older, because sounds leave no fossils, but the evidence points to language emerging in Africa, probably with our own species: estimates for "language proper" put it with Homo sapiens, "currently estimated at less than 200,000 years ago", and others link it to the rise of fully modern behaviour "some 50,000–150,000 years ago".

So every language spoken today is the present stage of a chain of speakers going back tens of thousands of years. Children learn the language of their parents, with small changes, and over enough generations the changes add up to a new language. No generation ever stops speaking one language and starts another from nothing.

That is why the question cannot be answered for living languages. Italian is not younger than Latin: it is Latin, as it is spoken in Italy two thousand years on. Modern Greek is the same Greek as the Linear B tablets, changed. English is a form of the language the Anglo-Saxons brought to Britain, which was a form of something older again. Any of them is exactly as old as any other. What differs is how long each has been written down, and whether it changed enough along the way that we gave it a new name.

A few languages do have a real birthday, and they show what the exception looks like. Esperanto was published in 1887 by one man, L. L. Zamenhof, which is why it is one of only 31 languages that Glottolog counts as artificial. Creoles such as Tok Pisin, in Papua New Guinea, formed in the last two centuries out of the meeting of languages. And a language can be newly named without being new: what was once called Serbo-Croatian is now four official languages, Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, though the speech itself did not change overnight.

So which is the oldest?

• Oldest written: Sumerian, from at least 3100 BC, with Egyptian in the same centuries.
• Longest written record: Egyptian, over 5,000 years.
• Oldest written and still spoken: Greek, from 1450–1350 BC; Chinese, from about 1250 BC.
• Oldest spoken: no answer exists. Every living language is as old as human speech.

How many languages there are today, and why that number is just as hard to pin down, is in how many languages are there in the world, and which of them have the most speakers in the most spoken languages in the world.

Learning one of the old ones

Verbavia (our own course) teaches two languages with three thousand years of written history behind them, Mandarin and Shanghainese, both written with characters descended from the oracle bones; Italian, which is Latin two thousand years on; and Esperanto, the one with a birthday. All are free on the web, a lesson a day.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Sumerian language (oldest attested, from at least 3100 BC; an isolate; the proto-literate period; replaced by Akkadian).
• Wikipedia: History of writing (cuneiform and hieroglyphs from proto-writing between 3400 and 3100 BC; independent development; Enheduanna; literature a millennium after writing).
• Wikipedia: Egyptian language (first recorded in the late 4th millennium BC; a written record of over 5,000 years; Coptic in liturgy).
• Wikipedia: Greek language (at least 3,400 years of records; the Linear B tablet of 1450–1350 BC; "the world's oldest recorded living language").
• Wikipedia: Chinese language (oracle bone inscriptions, c. 1250 BCE; the split into mutually unintelligible varieties).
• Wikipedia: Tamil language, Hebrew language and Basque language.
• Wikipedia: Origin of language (language proper with Homo sapiens, less than 200,000 years ago; behavioural modernity 50,000–150,000 years ago; sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Stone Age).
• Wikipedia: Tok Pisin and Serbo-Croatian.
• Glottolog 5.3: About languoids, for the 31 artificial languages, and its entry for Esperanto.