Latin and Ancient Greek are popular dead languages, but there are others that are much older. According to scholars, Sumerian is the first language in history. It is an isolated language from Mesopotamia with a cuneiform script that dates back to the 3rd millennium BCE. Ancient Egyptian flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. Researchers who discovered the first hieroglyphic texts were able to shed light on the civilization of ancient Egypt. Akkadian is another dead language from Mesopotamia that appeared 2,400 BCE. It is one of the Semitic languages that were spoken in North Africa.
According to some linguists, the oldest spoken language in the world may be Tamil. It is part of the Dravidian languages, a family of about thirty languages originating in India. Tamil is a language spoken by more than 85 million speakers mainly distributed in southern India and Sri Lanka. The first inscriptions in Old Tamil date from the 3rd century BC. Scholars have discovered them on cave walls in southern India and on pottery. Tamil grammar was mainly documented by the Tolkāppiyam, a collection dating from the end of the 2nd century. Tamil uses a syllabic alphabet based on Brahmi, a writing system that is two millennia old.
Ancient Chinese flourished during the Shang Dynasty, about 2000 BCE. Over the (…)
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