What Is the Oldest Language in the World?

With Hashem's help.

Greetings and blessings,

First of all, one must take note of a fascinating fact: all the nations in the world, even the oldest peoples known to us, do not preserve a history that goes back more than 4,300 years! Even China, which is the oldest civilization known to us, says that it began approximately 4,000 years ago.

Now, researchers are interested in attributing older periods to humanity on the basis of the theory of evolution, but human history contradicts this. If human beings had lived in the world for tens of thousands of years, then without a doubt our world would have historical traditions and history books more than 4,300 years old.

The truth must be said: when we find an ancient inscription, if we do not have historical documentation of that inscription among the people, we cannot know in any way with certainty when it was written. Carbon-14 dating is far from accurate beyond a few thousand years, and even the researchers allow themselves to shift the dates of the datings according to the theories.

The Sumerians were not actually called by the name Sumerians. That is the name given to them by a French researcher who lived more than a hundred years ago. No one knows what the Sumerians called themselves, or what their country was called. It is possible that Sumer was a culture that lived before the Flood, and perhaps they were the people of the famous and great city built by Cain, as told at the beginning of Sefer Bereishit. Since the Sumerians were wiped out, it is not possible to know much about their chronology and their period. Regarding dating as well, one must know that the half-life of carbon-14 does not exceed 6,000 years, so even scientifically any date beyond several thousand years is not reliable and not accurate.

Most European languages were formed as variations of older languages such as Latin and German, and that is why the alphabet of most languages is similar or identical. New languages are created all the time through movement to different regions, along with the creation of a new dialect formed from a new way of speaking.

The first languages in the world are the Semitic languages, which originated in Hebrew, from the Middle East. Therefore, the findings of the oldest civilizations in the world are in Semitic script.

The Torah reveals to us that the nations split apart after the destruction of the Tower of Babel, when Hashem confounded their language, and human beings spread with different languages to different continents in the world.

With blessings,

Daniel Bels