Which language has the longest background in history?

Leasnam   Wed Jun 02, 2010 3:48 pm GMT
<<Latin. It is still a spoken language, in fact it is the official language of Vatican City. >>

But it is no one's birthly (native) language.
Franco   Wed Jun 02, 2010 3:56 pm GMT
But it's spoken anyways.
+44(0)20 7831 1030   Wed Jun 02, 2010 4:17 pm GMT
African languages, then Asian and Pacific languages. English has always been the biggest language in Europe. Old English has a bigger volcubulary then all the other Germanic languages puten together.
moi   Wed Jun 02, 2010 5:37 pm GMT
Basque
Dickhead   Wed Jun 02, 2010 5:42 pm GMT
Esperanto
Adam   Wed Jun 02, 2010 6:54 pm GMT
The world's oldest surviving language is probably Tamil. It is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and Singapore. It is spoken as an official language by 66 million people.

It is one of India's 22 official languages as was the first Indian language to be declared a classical language by the Indian government, in 2004.

Tamil literature has existed for over 2,000 years. The earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE.

Like the European languages of Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian, Tamil is an agglutinative language which means that suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. There is no absolute limit on the length and extent of agglutination, which can lead to long words with a large number of suffixes.

There are five grammatical genders in Tamil, divided into two groups - rational - (uyartiṇai), and "irrational" (akṟiṇai).

Humans and deities belong to the rational class, and all other nouns belong to the irrational class.

Rational nouns and pronouns belong to one of three genders - masculine singular, feminine singular, and rational plural.

Irrational nouns and pronouns belong to one of two classes – irrational singular and irrational plural.

It's languages such as these that makes me glad that I speak English as a native language, so that I don't get my knickers in a twist over grammatical gender.

Even the Tamil alphabet is complicated. It has 12 vowel letters, 18 consonant letters, and one letter which is neither a vowel not a consonant. This is known as அலியெழுத்து "aliyeḻuttu" ("the hermaphrodite letter").

The complete alphabet, therefore, consists of the thirty-one letters in their independent form, and an additional 216 combinant letters representing a total 247 combinations (உயிர்மெய்யெழுத்து "uyirmeyyeḻuttu") of a consonant and a vowel, a mute consonant, or a vowel alone.
William   Thu Jun 03, 2010 8:56 am GMT
Proto-Sapian Language
-Mjdt-   Thu Jun 03, 2010 9:11 am GMT
>>Latin. It is still a spoken language, in fact it is the official language of Vatican City.

Actually they prefer speaking Italian than Latin nowadays....

I doubt anyone in the Vatican city actually speaks Latin these days. It's mainly just used for official documents I believe. When they have to invent new words to describe modern concepts and inventions that have occurred since whenever Latin ceased to be a lingua franca, at least several hundred years ago, they restrict themselves to classical sources, so these new terms are circumlocutions of several words, like 'sonorarum visualiumque taeniarum cistellula' for videocassette. Obviously completely impractical for spoken usage.
PARISIEN   Thu Jun 03, 2010 10:21 am GMT
Toutes les langues ont le même âge. Elles évoluent au point de devenir méconnaissables mais à des vitesses différentes.

Tenant compte du double critère
. ancienneté des sources écrites,
. stabilité morphologique et grammaticale,
il n'y a aucun doute que le grec est gagnant, avec 3500 ans de documents attestés et une étonnante stabilité dans le temps.
noname   Sat Jun 05, 2010 10:33 am GMT
Turkish has some common words with Sumerian. So, Turkish language can be as old as Sumerian.

Sumerian: ù
Old Turkic: u
Turkish: uyku
English: sleep

Sumerian: udi
Old Turkic: udi-
Turkish: uyu-
English: to sleep

Sumerian: dingir
Old Turkic: tengri
Turkish: tanrı
English: god

Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna detected 168 Sumerian words like these.
noname   Sat Jun 05, 2010 11:14 am GMT