What is the oldest surviving language in the world?

Answer 1

Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of South India and North-east Sri Lanka. It is considered the oldest surviving language and is thought to date back to the first century BC.

Written inscriptions of Tamil have been to be around 5th Century BC.

Answer 2

There are several contenders for the oldest currently spoken language in the world. There is no way to know exactly which one is the oldest, but the usual guesses are:

• Hebrew
  
• Tamil
  
• Sanskrit
  
• Arabic (only proposed by some religious Muslims)
• Chinese

There are examples of written Hebrew that date back to 3600 BCE, which is more than 3000 years older than the earliest examples of written Tamil. However, since both of these languages are far older than their written forms, it's impossible to know which is older.

Some currently spoken Native American languages may also be many millennia old, but there is no way to measure their age, because most of them do not have native writing systems.

Moreover, it's virtually impossible to measure the age of any currently spoken language, since language changes over time. In other words, the old form of a language may be considered a completely separate language from its modern counterpart.