8 Oldest Languages In India - Oldest.org (2023)

FAQs

What are the oldest languages in India? ›

The Sanskrit language has been spoken since 5,000 years before Christ. Sanskrit is still the official language of India.

American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS)

Tamil is possibly older than Sanskrit, in speech, but Sanskrit is definitely older than Tamil in writing (that we know of).

We do know Tamil is a classical language older than Latin, Greek, and Egyptian. And we know that it is oldest known language still in significant use. The earliest written work of Tamil is The Tolkāppiyam, which dates back between 2300 and 3000 years ago, based on linguistic and other evidence.

Though we can not ascertain the world's oldest language, other languages including Chinese and Egyptian are older than Tamil.

Tamil. Tamil is the oldest language still in use today. By order of appearance, the Tamil language (part of the family of Dravidian languages) would be considered the world's oldest living language as it is over 5,000 years old, with its first grammar book having made its first appearance in 3,000 BC.

Greek is derived from Mycenaean Greek which appeared around 700 years ago after which The Odyssey was written. Modern Greece that is spoken by 13.5 million people around the world has a rough origination from almost 3,500 years back. This is the second oldest language in the world which is still being used today.

By order of appearance, Tamil would be considered the world's oldest language as it is over 5,000 years old, having made its first appearance in 3,000 BC. The literature collection in Tamil, which is a classical language, is very vast. It is also varied.

Egyptian records are date back to to about 2,690 BC, which is much older by about 2,000 years than any historical evidence for Tamil.

Conversation. Sanskrit scholars always called Tamil as a sister language, and others as daughters. Thus Sanskrit can borrow from Tamil but not from others. The fact that Sanskrit words form 40% of Tamil vocabulary even today, hence Sanskrit is older.

Is Tamil 50,000 years old? ›

Tamil (5000 years old)

Indian Language Tamil is 5000 years old and is the official language of Sri Lanka as well as Singapore. It is the part of the Dravidian family and is also the only language that has survived all the way to the modern world.

Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C., and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.

The Tamil people are an ethnic group from South Asia with a recorded history going back more than two millennia. The oldest Tamil communities are those of southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka.

The written origins of the language have been traced back to 1250 BC in the late Shang dynasty. Along with Tamil, Chinese is one of the oldest surviving languages in the world. Hebrew: While many believe that Hebrew has been used for the last 5000 years, its earliest written examples date only to 1000BC.

1 • INTRODUCTION. The Tamil name comes from "Damila." This is the name of a non-Aryan people mentioned in early Buddhist and Jain records. The Tamil have roots in western India, Pakistan, and areas farther to the west. The peoples of the Indus civilization spoke a Dravidian language around 2500 BC .

In many of the world languages, words that have no connection with Tamil language are a rarity. Therefore, the fact that Tamil is the mother of all languages in the world is beyond reasonable doubt and cannot be contradicted or disproved easily!

There are four Dravidian langauges - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. Among them, Tamil is the oldest.

Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.

Some believe that Telugu evolved from proto-Dravidian, which is the mother of 21 languages that took birth south of the Vindhyas. Those who argue that Telugu is older than Tamil, peg the date of origin of Telugu to at least 1000 years BCE (3000 years old).

What is the mother of all languages? ›

He said: “... In the beginning, Sanskrit stood as mother of all languages and encouraged all languages and was the reason for their growth and prosperity. One may note that most of the works in Sanskrit have been translated into other Indian languages.”

Connected with South India

This helped ensure that the modern Tamils could be described as both indigenous people of South India and the direct descendants of the people of Kumari Kandam. This, in turn, allowed them to describe the Tamil language and culture as the world's oldest.

The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.

The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda, a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE.

Sanskrit (5000 years old) - World's Oldest Language

Source Unlike Tamil, which is still a widely spoken language, Sanskrit is the oldest language in the world but fell out of common usage around 600 B.C. It is now a liturgical language - the holy languages found in the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

A stone inscription in Modi script (used to write Marathi language), that was unearthed in Thanjavur reveals that the age of Tamil language could date back to more than 10,000 years. Such archaeological evidence provide ample proof to establish the antiquity of Tamil as an ancient language.

Egypt: 6000 BC. India: 2500 BC. Vietnam: 4000 Years Old.

In terms of the language that has the longest written history, that's probably Egyptian which later became Coptic (5,000 years). Sanskrit and Greek also come close.

Sanskrit remained the dominant cultural language from 10th century to modern times. Contending that Sanskrit was not indigenous but, like all other languages, came from Africa, Dr. Scharf said all modern languages in India draw about 50 per cent from Sanskrit, with Malayalam and Kannada topping the list.

Is Chinese influenced by Sanskrit? ›

He said Sanskrit was the most important language through which Chinese learned about Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Indian medicine, astronomy and mathematics. “While Buddhism declined in India, it became very strong in China and has become part of Chinese culture," he told PTI.

Sanskrit traces its linguistic ancestry to Proto-Indo-Iranian and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European languages, meaning that it can be traced historically back to the people who spoke Indo-Iranian, also called the Aryan languages, as well as the Indo-European languages, a family of several hundred related languages and ...

According to Ashok Raja of Madurai, his ancestor Vikrama Singe was earlier known as Prince Kannasamy and was the last king of Sri Lanka from Tamil Nadu belonging to the Madurai Nayak dynasty. He had fought against the British who defeated him in 1815.

During the 1st to the 4th century, the early Cholas ruled the lands of Tamil Nadu. The first and the most important king of this dynasty was Karikalan.

Conversation. Forget about any Tamil work older than Rigveda, if one can find out a single work in Tamil for 1000 years after Rigveda was written I will do shastang dandavat to him. Even Prakrit is older than Tamil!

The Aramaic word for God is אלהא Elāhā ( Biblical Aramaic) and ܐܠܗܐ Alāhā ( Syriac), which comes from the same Proto- Semitic word (* ʾil-) as the Arabic and Hebrew terms; Jesus is described in Mark 15:34 as having used the word on the cross, with the ending meaning "my", when saying, "My God, my God, why hast Thou ...

Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. The corresponding Aramaic form is Elah (אלה), but its emphatic state is Elaha (אלהא). It is written as ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlâhâ) in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply "God".

However, both the Western and Eastern Syriac Christian traditions use the Aramaic name ܝܫܘܥ (in Hebrew script: ישוע) Yeshuʿ and Yishoʿ, respectively, including the ʿayin.

According to their tradition, Sri Lankan Tamils are lineal descendants of the aboriginal Naga and Yaksha people of Sri Lanka.

The Indian population originated from three separate waves of migration from Africa, Iran and Central Asia over a period of 50,000 years, scientists have found using genetic evidence from people alive in the subcontinent today.

Is Tamil mentioned in the Bible? ›

Some of these loan words are present in the earliest transcripts of the Bible. By the mid-nineteenth century, Christian missionaries trained in Biblical Hebrew noticed that there were words of Indian origin in the Bible, including from the Tamil language.

Sanskrit is the oldest language in the world, but it faded away as a commonly spoken language. The first written record of Sanskrit can be found in scriptures and Rigveda, a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns. It is still India's one of the official languages.

1. Tamil (5000 years old) - Oldest Living Language of the World. Source Spoken by 78 million people and official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, Tamil is the oldest language in the world. It is the only ancient language that has survived all the way to the modern world.

Tamil. Of the four literary languages in the Dravidian family, Tamil is the oldest, with examples dating to the early Common Era. In the early 21st century, Tamil was spoken by more than 66 million people, mostly residing in India, northern Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Fiji, and Myanmar (Burma).

Kannada is the oldest language along with Prakrit, Sanskrit, and Tamil. Linguists are of believing that Kannada branched off from the proto-Tamil South Dravidian division even before the Christian Era. This means it was spoken way before English and Hindi.

Tamil, like other Dravidian languages, ultimately descends from the Proto-Dravidian language, which was most likely spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin.

The Telugu language is not derived from Tamil. Telegu is one of the Dravidian languages, originated along with Gondi (spoken in Madhya Pradesh) and Kovi(spoken in Orissa). It is mainly spoken by the people in the southeastern state of India - Andra Pradesh and Telangana.

Sanskrit is a more recent language, and even though it has left its mark on Telugu's lexicon, they are not descendants from the same language tree.

Is Kannada derived from Tamil? ›

Yes, Tamil is said to be the mother of all Dravidian languages. It dates back 5000 years. It is recognized as the oldest language in the world. There are four Dravidian literary languages in Southern India, of which Tamil is the oldest.

Kannada became a written language ahead of Telugu. Kannada produced many poetries during the eighth century under Chalukyas. Full-fledged literary works in Kannada appeared in the ninth century, two centuries later they became available in Telugu. The earliest known Telugu inscriptions date to the 6th century CE.