What Is the Oldest Language Still Spoken?

Short answer

• There is no single settled answer to which language is the oldest still spoken, because the answer changes with the measure used. First written evidence, unbroken everyday use, and continuous literary tradition each point to a different language.
• By the earliest written evidence among languages still spoken as a mother tongue today, Greek has the strongest claim. Mycenaean Greek appears in Linear B tablets from around the 15th century BCE, and Greek has been spoken continuously ever since, with a written record reaching back to around 1450 BCE.
• Tamil has the strongest claim for an unbroken literary tradition. Its inscriptions date to the 3rd century BCE, its classical literature begins around the 1st century CE, and it is still the first language of tens of millions of people.
• Hebrew is the most remarkable case of all, because it stopped being an everyday spoken language for well over a thousand years and was then revived in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is now the official language of Israel and the first language of millions.
• Egyptian has even older roots, but its modern form, Coptic, survives only as a church language with no native speakers. That is why it cannot win a contest judged on living speech, even though its written record reaches back further than any of the others.

Why the Question Has No Single Answer

Ask which language is the oldest still spoken and you will get a different answer from almost every source you consult. One list names Greek. Another names Tamil. A third names Hebrew, and a fourth names Egyptian. None of them is lying. They are measuring different things, and the question itself hides three separate questions inside it.

The first question is about evidence. Speech leaves no fossils. People were certainly speaking long before anyone invented writing, perhaps tens of thousands of years earlier, and those first spoken languages are gone without a trace. The only age we can prove for a language is the age of its oldest surviving written record, and that record is usually much younger than the language itself. A language can be far older than its first inscription, and we would never know. That is why linguists talk about attestation, the first time a language shows up in writing, rather than about the date a language was born. The two are not the same, and confusing them is the most common mistake in this whole debate.

The second question is about continuity. Suppose a language was written down 3,000 years ago and is still spoken today. That sounds like an unbroken line, but the line is rarely as straight as it looks. Languages change. The Greek of a Linear B inventory tablet is not the Greek spoken in Athens today, and the Tamil of a 3rd century BCE inscription is not the Tamil spoken in Chennai today. What survives is a chain of change, with each generation speaking a slightly different version of what their grandparents spoke. Some chains have gaps. Hebrew has the biggest gap of all, because it stopped being anyone’s everyday language for more than a thousand years before it was revived. Coptic has a different kind of gap, because it stopped being a mother tongue and survived only in church services. Deciding how much change, and how long a gap, a language can survive before it stops counting as the same language is a judgment call, not a measurement.

The third question is about what counts as spoken. Does a language used only in prayer count as still spoken? Does a language with a few hundred speakers count the same as one with 80 million? Does a language that survives only in religious study count at all? Most readers mean a language that people still learn as children and use in daily life, and this article uses that meaning as its main test, while explaining where the other meanings lead.

Once those three questions are separated, the picture becomes clearer, and also more interesting. The honest answer is not a single name. It is a short list of candidates, each of which wins on one measure and loses on another. The rest of this article works through that list, gives the evidence for each candidate, and explains what each claim actually proves. For the bigger picture of how many languages share the world today, see our guide to how many languages there are in the world.

The Candidates at a Glance

The table below gives the earliest written evidence, the kind of continuity, and the present day situation for each of the main candidates. The dates are the dates of the oldest surviving written evidence, not the dates the languages began, because those dates are unknown.

Two things stand out from the table. First, the oldest written evidence belongs to languages that are no longer anyone’s mother tongue. Second, among the languages that are still learned by children and spoken at home, Greek has the oldest written evidence, and Tamil has the oldest continuous literary tradition. Everything else in this article is the detail behind those two sentences.

Greek: The Oldest Written Evidence

Greek has the best documented claim to be the oldest language still spoken, and it rests on clay tablets. Mycenaean Greek is the earliest attested form of the language, spoken on the Greek mainland and Crete in the 16th to 12th centuries BCE. It is preserved in Linear B, a syllabic script written on clay tablets found mostly at Knossos and Pylos. The script was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, building on the work of Alice Kober, and the tablets turned out to be palace records, mostly lists and inventories, with no poetry and no stories. Even so, they are enough to prove that Greek was being written more than 3,400 years ago.

The earliest generally accepted Linear B tablets come from the Room of the Chariot Tablets at Knossos and date to the second half of the 15th century BCE. Greek therefore has a written record reaching back to around 1450 BCE, and, unlike the record of Egyptian or Sumerian, the chain of Greek speakers has never broken. When Linear B disappeared with the collapse of the Mycenaean palace system around 1200 BCE, Greek itself did not disappear. It continued to be spoken through the centuries that followed, and when writing returned, it returned in the Greek alphabet, the ancestor of the alphabet used for Greek today. From the poems of Homer through the plays of Athens, the New Testament, the Byzantine chronicles, and the newspapers of modern Athens, Greek has a written record stretching back more than three thousand years.

That continuity is what makes the Greek claim so strong. A history of the Greeks notes that of all languages, Greek is the one with the longest continuous record, running from the 14th century BCE to the latest edition of a morning newspaper in Athens. No other living language can match that span of written evidence, reaching back more than three thousand years. Greek is also the oldest attested living Indo-European language, which means it is the earliest member of the great language family that includes English, Spanish, Hindi, and Russian to survive in writing and still be spoken today.

Modern Greek is not the same language as Mycenaean Greek, and it is not the same as the Greek of Homer or of the New Testament. Pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary have all changed, as they have in every language that has been spoken for thousands of years. But the chain of speakers has never broken. Children have learned Greek from their parents in every generation since the Bronze Age, and that unbroken chain is what the claim really rests on. About 13 million people speak Greek today, mostly in Greece and Cyprus. For the myths that the Greek language carried through those centuries, see our guide to the Greek mythology family tree.

Tamil: The Longest Unbroken Literary Tradition

If Greek wins on the age of its first written evidence, Tamil wins on the depth and continuity of its literature. Tamil is a Dravidian language of India and Sri Lanka, and Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it the oldest literature in India apart from literature written in classical Sanskrit. Some Tamil inscriptions on stone have been dated to the 3rd century BCE, but Tamil literature proper begins around the 1st century CE. That gives Tamil a literary tradition more than 2,000 years old, still alive in a language spoken by tens of millions of people today.

The early classical literature of Tamil is known as Sangam literature, named for the literary academies, or sangams, where poets gathered. Scholars generally place the Sangam period from around 300 BCE to 300 CE, though some argue for a narrower range. The surviving corpus contains 2,381 poems by 473 poets, including women poets, and it is largely secular in character, concerned with love, war, kingship, and the natural world rather than with religion. Alongside the poems sits the Tolkappiyam, the oldest surviving work of Tamil grammar, which shows that Tamil already had a developed system of grammar and poetics in antiquity.

Tamil’s claim is different from the Greek claim in an important way. Greek is older in its first written evidence by more than a thousand years. But Tamil has something Greek does not have in the same form, which is a continuous literary tradition that has never been interrupted by a collapse of writing or by a long period in which the language was only spoken and not written. Tamil literature runs from the Sangam poems through the twin epics of the 4th to 6th centuries CE, the Cilappatikaram and the Manimekalai, through the devotional poetry of the following centuries, and on to the novels, films, and newspapers of today. The language has changed, as all living languages do, but the literary tradition has never stopped.

India recognized that depth in 2004, when the Government of India declared Tamil the first of its classical languages, a status given to languages with an ancient literary heritage. Tamil is spoken today by tens of millions of people, with estimates commonly falling between 70 million and 85 million, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in Sri Lanka, in Singapore, in Malaysia, and in Tamil communities around the world. It is one of the few ancient languages that is also a thriving modern language of cinema, politics, science, and everyday life. That combination of age and vitality is why Tamil appears at or near the top of almost every list of the oldest living languages. For the civilization that grew up alongside Tamil in southern Asia, see our guide to the civilization of the Indus Valley, and for the oldest written works of India, see our guide to the oldest book in the world.

Hebrew: The Language That Came Back

Hebrew is the most extraordinary case in this survey, because it breaks the rules that the other candidates follow. Every other language on the list survived by never stopping. Hebrew survived by stopping and then starting again.

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Canaanite group, closely related to Phoenician and Moabite. It was spoken in ancient times in Palestine, and its earliest written examples date to around the 10th century BCE. Most of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew. But from about the 3rd century BCE onward, Hebrew was gradually supplanted as an everyday spoken language by Aramaic, and it ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE. It did not die, because it continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language. For more than a thousand years, Hebrew was the language of prayer, of study, and of learned writing across the Jewish world, but it was nobody’s mother tongue and nobody’s language for buying bread or talking to children.

That changed in the late 19th century. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a Jewish activist who had moved to Palestine in 1881, led a movement to revive Hebrew as a modern spoken language, and the revival is now widely described as the only successful large scale example of a language being brought back to everyday spoken use. Modern Hebrew was built from Biblical Hebrew, with spelling and grammar drawn from later rabbinic Hebrew and pronunciation influenced by Sephardic tradition, and it gained new words for the modern world. It became the main language of the Jewish community in Palestine and then, in 1948, the official language of the State of Israel. Today it is spoken by about 9 million people, of whom about 5 million are native speakers.

Does that make Hebrew the oldest language still spoken? It depends on how strictly continuity is judged. If the test is unbroken everyday speech from antiquity to the present, Hebrew fails it, because the chain of native speakers broke for more than a thousand years. If the test is the age of the language’s written record combined with living use today, Hebrew passes it impressively, because its written record reaches back to the 10th century BCE and it is now a living national language. Either way, Hebrew is the proof that a language can be rescued from liturgical use and made a mother tongue again, something no other ancient language has achieved on anything like the same scale. Readers interested in the texts themselves can see our guides to when the Bible was written and what language the Bible was written in.

Chinese: The Oldest Continuous Writing Tradition

Chinese enters this contest in a different way from the others, because Chinese is not a single spoken language. It is a family of related varieties, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, and others, which share a writing system but are not mutually intelligible in speech. When people say Chinese is 3,000 years old, they usually mean the written language, and they have a point.

The earliest attested form of Chinese appears in oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty, dating to around 1250 BCE. These are questions carved into ox bones and turtle shells, mostly about harvests, hunts, and the will of the ancestors, and they already show a developed writing system. Chinese characters have been used continuously ever since, which makes Chinese writing one of the oldest writing systems still in daily use in the world. More than 1 billion people speak some form of Chinese today, and Mandarin alone is the most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers.

But the spoken side of the story is more complicated. The Chinese spoken today is not the Old Chinese of the oracle bones. Spoken Chinese has changed enormously over three thousand years, and it has split into many varieties that differ from one another as much as French differs from Spanish. A speaker of modern Mandarin could not understand the speech of the Shang dynasty, and could not even hold a conversation with a speaker of modern Cantonese without switching languages. So Chinese has the oldest continuous writing tradition of any living language family, but as a spoken language its claim is harder to state simply. It is best described as a language family with a 3,000 year old written record, rather than as a single language that has been spoken unchanged since 1250 BCE.

Sanskrit: Ancient, Revered, Barely Spoken

Sanskrit is often named in lists of the oldest languages, and its written record is genuinely ancient. The Vedas, the oldest Indian writings, are a collection of religious poems in Sanskrit that were composed between about 1500 and 1200 BCE. Sanskrit is also one of the oldest members of the Indo-European family, and it has been studied, taught, and used in religious life without interruption for more than three thousand years. It is one of the 22 officially recognized languages of India.

But Sanskrit fails the test of living speech. In the 2011 Census of India, only 24,821 people reported Sanskrit as their mother tongue, out of a population of more than 1.2 billion. About 3.1 million people reported it as a first, second, or third language, which shows that many Indians learn it, but almost nobody grows up speaking it at home. Sanskrit is a liturgical and learned language, alive in temples, universities, and scholarship, and it has contributed a huge number of words to modern Indian languages. It is not, however, a language that children learn from their parents as their first language in any significant numbers. On the measure that matters most for this question, everyday spoken use, Sanskrit belongs in the same category as Latin and Coptic: ancient, revered, and still used, but not really a living mother tongue.

Egyptian and Coptic: The Oldest Roots, but No Native Speakers

Egyptian is the candidate with the oldest written evidence of all. Egyptian hieroglyphs appear from around 3200 BCE, and the Egyptian language was written and spoken for more than 3,000 years, through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, and into the Roman period. Its last stage was Coptic, which was spoken in Egypt from about the 2nd century CE and written in the Greek alphabet with seven additional letters borrowed from the earlier demotic script. Coptic replaced the religious vocabulary of earlier Egyptian with words borrowed from Greek, and it flourished as a literary language from the 2nd to the 13th centuries.

But Coptic stopped being a mother tongue. It was gradually replaced by Arabic as the everyday language of Egypt after the Arab conquest, and by the 14th century its literary life had largely ended. Today Coptic has no native speakers. It remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church, and a small number of priests and scholars can speak it, but nobody learns it as a first language at home. For that reason, Egyptian cannot be called the oldest language still spoken, even though it has the oldest written record of any language in this survey. It is the oldest language still used in worship, which is a real achievement, but it is not the same thing. The civilization that produced those hieroglyphs is described in our guide to Egypt’s Great Pyramid.

Aramaic and Arabic: Two Semitic Survivors

Aramaic and Arabic are two more Semitic languages with ancient roots, and they show how different survival can look. Aramaic was once the great lingua franca of the ancient Near East, the language of administration across the Persian Empire and the language spoken in the region at the time of Jesus. Its written record reaches back to around the 10th century BCE. Today it survives in much reduced form, spoken by small communities of Syriac Christians and others in the Middle East and in diaspora communities around the world. It has survived for about three thousand years, but only just, and its future depends on small communities keeping it alive.

Arabic is in a much stronger position. Written Arabic is attested from the early centuries CE, which makes its written record younger than those of Greek, Tamil, Hebrew, and Chinese. But Arabic has something none of the older candidates has: hundreds of millions of speakers. Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam and the official language of more than twenty countries, and its classical form, the language of the Quran, has been preserved with unusual stability. Modern spoken Arabic varies widely from region to region, so much so that a speaker from Morocco and a speaker from Iraq may struggle to understand each other, but all of them share the written standard. Arabic is not the oldest language still spoken, because its written record starts later than the others, but it is a reminder that age and strength are different things. A language can be younger and far more widely spoken.

Basque: Old, but Impossible to Date

Basque is the most mysterious candidate on the list, and it shows the limits of the whole exercise. Basque, or Euskara, is spoken in the western Pyrenees, in northern Spain and southwestern France, and it is a language isolate, which means it has no accepted relationship with any other living language. It is not related to Spanish or French, its neighbors, and it is not a member of the Indo-European family at all. Most scholars believe it is the last surviving descendant of one of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe, and that an early form of it was present in the region before the Indo-European languages arrived in the 3rd millennium BCE.

If that is right, Basque could be older than any language on this list in the sense of having roots that reach back before the Bronze Age. But there is no way to prove it, because Basque has almost no early written record. Its first clear written evidence comes from the Roman period and later, thousands of years after the language itself may have begun. A language that was spoken but never written down leaves no date, and Basque is the clearest example of the gap between a language’s real age and its attested age. It may be the oldest language in Europe, and we may never be able to prove it. About 700,000 people speak Basque today, and its survival is a remarkable story in itself, but it cannot be given a date, and so it cannot win a contest that is judged on dates.

Latin: Why It Does Not Count

Latin appears on many lists of the oldest languages, and it deserves a mention, because its influence is everywhere. Latin inscriptions appear from around the 7th century BCE, and Latin became the language of the Roman Empire, of the Catholic Church, of law, of medicine, and of science. Its descendants, the Romance languages, include Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, which are spoken by hundreds of millions of people today.

But Latin itself is not spoken as a mother tongue by anyone. It survives as the official language of the Vatican, as a liturgical language, and as a language of scholarship, and it is still taught in schools. Nobody, however, learns Latin as a first language at home, and nobody raises children in Latin. In that respect Latin is like Sanskrit and Coptic: a classical language that is still used, but not a living spoken language. Its children, the Romance languages, are living languages, but they are not Latin, and they are much younger than Latin itself. Latin therefore does not qualify as the oldest language still spoken, even though its legacy is larger than that of any other language on this list.

What “Still Spoken” Has to Mean

The survey above shows that the answer depends on definitions, so it is worth stating the definitions plainly. A language can be alive in several different ways, and only one of them is what most readers mean by still spoken.

A language with native speakers is one that children learn at home as their first language. Greek, Tamil, Chinese, Arabic, and Basque all pass this test. A language with only second language speakers is one that people learn later in life, for study, religion, or work. Sanskrit mostly falls into this category today. A liturgical language is one used in worship and religious study. Coptic, Latin, and Sanskrit all survive this way, and Hebrew survived this way for more than a thousand years before its revival. A language can also survive in writing alone, read but never spoken, which is the state of Sumerian and Akkadian today.

The strictest test, and the one this article applies, is the first one: children still learn it at home, and adults still use it in daily life. On that test, Greek has the oldest written evidence, Tamil has the oldest continuous literary tradition, and Hebrew is the most remarkable story of return. Loosen the test to include liturgical use, and Egyptian wins on age. Loosen it further to include family age without written evidence, and Basque may be the oldest of all, though nobody can prove it. The lesson is that “oldest” is not a property a language simply has. It is a verdict that depends on the question being asked, and the honest thing is to say which question is being answered.

How to Judge Any “Oldest Language” Claim

Claims about the oldest language are everywhere on the internet, and most of them are less reliable than they look. A short checklist helps a reader tell a solid claim from a shaky one.

First, check whether the source gives a date and says what the date is a date of. A claim that a language is 5,000 years old usually means that its written record, or its language family, is 5,000 years old, not that anyone can prove people were speaking that exact language 5,000 years ago. Second, check whether the source distinguishes between a language and its family. Saying that Chinese is 3,000 years old is not the same as saying Mandarin is 3,000 years old, because Mandarin is only one branch of a much older family. Third, check whether the source mentions continuity. A language that stopped being spoken for a thousand years and was then revived is a different kind of survivor from one that was never interrupted, and both are different from a language that survives only in church services. Fourth, be suspicious of any claim that names a single winner without explaining what the other candidates lose on. A list that crowns Tamil without mentioning Greek, or crowns Greek without mentioning Coptic, is hiding the argument rather than making it. Fifth, check whether the source names its evidence. A claim that rests on named inscriptions, named texts, and named scholars can be checked. A claim that rests on “scientists say” cannot.

The best sources on this subject are reference works and academic institutions, not list articles. Encyclopaedia Britannica, the British Museum, Ethnologue, and university departments of linguistics all give dates with their evidence attached, and they all hedge where the evidence is thin. The hedging is not weakness. It is the sign that the source is telling the truth about what is known and what is not. Anyone who wants to go deeper should start with the sources listed below, and should compare them with each other rather than trusting any single one. For the wider question of which languages came first in the written record, see our companion article on the earliest language in the world, and for the oldest faiths that those languages carried, see our guide to what the world’s oldest religion is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the oldest language still spoken today?

There is no single agreed answer. Greek has the oldest written evidence among languages still spoken as a mother tongue, with Linear B tablets from around the 15th century BCE and a written record reaching back more than three thousand years. Tamil has the oldest continuous literary tradition, with inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE and literature from around the 1st century CE. The answer depends on whether the measure is first written evidence, unbroken everyday use, or continuous literature.

Is Tamil the oldest language in the world?

Tamil is one of the oldest living languages, but it is not the oldest language in the world by every measure. Its inscriptions date to the 3rd century BCE and its literature begins around the 1st century CE, which is younger than the first written evidence for Greek. Tamil’s strongest claim is the continuity of its literary tradition, which has run without interruption for more than 2,000 years, and the fact that it is still the first language of tens of millions of people. Claims that Tamil is 5,000 years old rest on the age of its language family or on tradition, not on written evidence.

Is Hebrew the oldest language still spoken?

Hebrew has one of the oldest written records of any living language, with inscriptions from around the 10th century BCE, but it was not spoken continuously. It stopped being an everyday spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE and survived for more than a thousand years as a liturgical and literary language before it was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is now the official language of Israel, spoken by about 9 million people. Whether it counts as the oldest depends on whether a revival counts as continuity.

Is Sanskrit still spoken?

Sanskrit is still used, but almost nobody speaks it as a mother tongue. In the 2011 Census of India, 24,821 people reported Sanskrit as their first language, and about 3.1 million reported it as a first, second, or third language. It remains a liturgical language and a language of scholarship, and it is one of the 22 officially recognized languages of India, but it is not a living everyday language in the way Tamil or Greek is.

What is the oldest written language?

Sumerian is generally considered the oldest written language, with cuneiform writing first used in Mesopotamia around 3400 BCE. Egyptian hieroglyphs followed, from around 3200 BCE. Neither language is still spoken. Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 BCE, and Egyptian survives only as Coptic, a liturgical language with no native speakers. For the first civilizations that produced these writing systems, see our guide to the first civilization on Earth.

Why do different websites name different oldest languages?

Because they use different measures and rarely say so. Some rank by the age of the first written evidence, which favors Greek or Egyptian. Some rank by continuous literary tradition, which favors Tamil. Some count liturgical use, which favors Coptic or Sanskrit. Some repeat traditional claims without checking them, which is how inflated ages of 5,000 years or more appear. A reliable answer names its measure, gives the date, and explains what the other candidates win on.

Can a dead language come back to life?

Hebrew shows that it can, and it is the only large scale success so far. Hebrew was revived as a spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after more than a thousand years without native speakers, and it is now the first language of millions. Smaller revivals exist, including Cornish and Manx, but none has reached anything like the scale of Hebrew. The Hebrew revival depended on a community that already knew the language from religious study and that chose to raise children in it, which is a combination that is very hard to reproduce. For readers thinking about learning a language themselves, our guide to how to learn a language explains realistic timelines and a weekly speaking method, and our guide to the easiest language to learn compares the languages that take the least time for English speakers.

Sources & references

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Tamil literature", https://www.britannica.com/art/Tamil-literature (Tamil is the oldest literature in India apart from classical Sanskrit; some inscriptions on stone have been dated to the 3rd century BC; Tamil literature proper begins around the 1st century AD).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Hebrew language", https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hebrew-language (Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Northern Central group; it was supplanted by Aramaic beginning about the 3rd century BCE; it continued as a liturgical and literary language; it was revived as a spoken language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is the official language of Israel).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Coptic language", https://www.britannica.com/print/article/136916 (Coptic was spoken in Egypt from about the 2nd century CE and represents the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language; Bohairic has been used for religious purposes since the 11th century; the latest Coptic texts date from the 14th century).
• Ethnologue, "How many languages are there in the world?", https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/how-many-languages/ (7,159 languages are in use today; roughly 44 percent of all languages are now endangered).
• History Extra, "Cuneiform: 6 things you (probably) didn't know about the world's oldest writing system", https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/cuneiform-6-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-worlds-oldest-writing-system/ (cuneiform was first used in around 3400 BC and is the oldest form of writing in the world; the British Museum holds more than 130,000 cuneiform tablets).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Kids, "Indian literature", https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Indian-literature/353287 (the Vedas were written down in Sanskrit between about 1500 and 1200 BCE).
• Census of India 2011, via the Office of the Registrar General, "Distribution of the 22 Scheduled Languages" (24,821 people reported Sanskrit as their mother tongue in 2011; 3,122,823 reported Sanskrit as a first, second, or third language).
• Wikipedia, "Mycenaean Greek", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek (Mycenaean Greek is the earliest attested form of the Greek language, spoken in the 16th to 12th centuries BC; the earliest generally accepted Linear B tablet dates to the second half of the 15th century BCE; Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952).
• Wikipedia, "Sangam literature", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangam_literature (the Sangam period spanned from around 300 BCE to 300 CE; the corpus comprises 2,381 poems composed by 473 poets; the Tolkappiyam is the oldest surviving Tamil grammar).
• Wikipedia, "Basque language", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language (Basque is a language isolate with no relation to any other living language; most scholars believe it is the last remaining descendant of one of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe; an early form was likely present before the arrival of Indo-European languages in the 3rd millennium BC).
• Wikipedia, "Hebrew language", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language (Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE; it was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century; about 9 million speakers of Modern Hebrew, of whom 5 million are native speakers, as of 2018).
• Wikipedia, "Coptic language", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language (Coptic has no modern day native speakers; it remains in daily use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church).
• Oldest.org, "10 Oldest Spoken Languages in the World", https://www.oldest.org/culture/spoken-languages/ (Greek is attested from the 16th century BCE with about 13.5 million speakers; Tamil is attested from around 300 BCE with about 75 million speakers; Egyptian hieroglyphs date to around 3200 BCE; Arabic is attested from around the 1st century CE).
• Blackwell Publishing, "The Greeks", sample chapter, https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/content_store/Sample_Chapter/9781405167321/9781405167321_001.pdf (of all languages Greek is the one with the longest continuous record, extending from the 14th century BC to the present day).
• Circle Translations, "Oldest Languages in the World", https://circletranslations.com/blog/oldest-languages-in-the-world (Tamil has a literary tradition going back over 2,000 years; Sumerian is the earliest written language, first attested around 3100 BCE; Chinese oracle bone inscriptions date to around 1250 BCE).