My article on a few oldest languages still spoken, published on May 1, 2018, The Bangladesh Post 01/05/2018 Education | Published : 30 Apr 2018 When languages survive amidst vanishing voices Avik Gangopadhyay writes about few of the oldest languages which are still spoken Languages are a vulnerable aspect of any cultural heritage and therefore, it is extremely important to preserve them. When languages fade away, future generations lose a vital part of their culture that is necessary to completely understand it. With the ingression of technology, culture and society becoming more reliant on it, both major as well as minor languages struggle to find their places in the digital world. Yet some languages, for their queer linguistic particularities, generation after generation, without much language evolution, find voice in utterances in different parts of the world. Here we have presented some ancient languages with specialities which differentiate them from the general. Lithuanian Most European languages belong to the Indo-European family, but they started splitting apart from each other around 3500 BCE. They developed into other languages like German, Italian, and English, gradually losing the features that they had all shared. One language, in the Baltic language branch of the Indo-European family, retained more of the feature of what linguists call Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which is the language that was spoken around 3500 BCE. For whatever reason, Lithuanian has kept more sounds and grammar rules from PIE than any of its linguistic cousins, and can therefore be called one of the oldest languages in the world. It is the official language of Lithuania as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. Basque A language with an element of linguistic mystery, Basque (euskara) is a language with no known linguistic relatives, spoken by about 660,000 people mainly in the Basque country (Euskal Herria) in the north of Spain and the south west of France. Basque first appeared in writing in Latin religious texts, the Glosas Emilianenses, dating from the 11th century. It is completely unrelated to any Romance language (unlike French and Spanish) or any other languages in the world. Linguists have postulated over decades about what it could have been related to, but none have developed any convincing theory. Icelandic With 358000 (2013) native speakers, Icelandic is an Indo-European language, from the North Germanic branch. Many Germanic languages have streamlined themselves and lost some of the features that other Indo-European languages have, but Icelandic has developed much more conservatively and retained many of these features. Danish governance of the country from the 14th to the 20th century also had very little effect on the Icelandic language, so it has mostly gone unchanged since Norse settlers brought it there when they came to the country, and Icelandic speakers can easily read the sagas written centuries ago. Majority of Icelandic speakers, about 320,000, live in Iceland. More than 8,000 Icelandic speakers live in Denmark, of whom approximately 3,000 are students. The language is also spoken by some 5,000 people in the United States and by more than 1,400 people in Canada. Finnish Today with native speakers just above 5.4 million (2012), it is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. Finnish may not have been written down until the 16th century, but as with any language, it has a history that stretches back way earlier than that. It is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which also includes Estonian, Hungarian, and several smaller languages spoken by minority groups across Siberia. Finnish includes many loan words, which were adopted into Finnish from other language families over the centuries. In many cases, Finnish has retained these loan words closer to their original form than the language that they came from. Georgian Georgian is a Kartvelian language with 3.7 million (2014) native speakers. It is the official language of Georgia. Georgian is written in its own writing system, the Georgian script. The Caucasus region is a real hotbed for linguists who seek out difficult world languages. The main languages of the three south Caucasian countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, come from three entirely different language families—respectively Indo-European, Turkic, and Kartvelian. Georgian is the biggest Kartvelian language, and it is the only Caucasian language with an ancient literary tradition. Its beautiful and unique alphabets are also quite ancient—they are thought to have been adapted from Aramaic. While not a language island in the same sense as Basque, there are only four Kartvelian languages, all spoken by minorities within Georgia, and they are all unrelated to any other languages in the world. Macedonian Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by around 2.5 million (2011), principally in the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian diaspora, the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia. The Slavic language family, which includes Russian, Polish, Czech, and Croatian, among others, is relatively young as far as languages go. They only started splitting off from their common ancestor, Common Slavic (or Proto-Slavic), when Cyril and Methodius standardized the language, creating what is now called Old Church Slavonic, and created an alphabet for it. They then took the language north with them in the 9th century as they went to convert the Slavs to Christianity. They came from somewhere just north of Greece, probably in what is now known as Macedonia (or the Republic of Macedonia or FYROM following Macedonian naming disputes), and Macedonian (together with its very close relative Bulgarian) is the language that is closely related to Old Church Slavonic today. Irish Gaelic Although Irish Gaelic (Goidelic language) is only spoken as a native language by a small majority of 73,804 in Ireland (2016) nowadays, it has a long history behind it. It is a member of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages, and it existed on the islands that are now Great Britain and Ireland well before the Germanic influences. Irish Gaelic was the language from which Scottish Gaelic and Manx (which used to be spoken on the Isle of Man) arose, but the fact that really lands it on this list is that it has the oldest vernacular literature of any language in Western Europe. While the rest of Europe was speaking their own languages and writing in Latin, the Irish decided that they wanted to write in their own language instead. Tamil Tamil, a language spoken by about 78 million people and recognized as an official language in Sri Lanka and Singapore, is the only classical language that has survived all the way through to the modern world. Tamil is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world. It is stated as 20th in the Ethnologue list of most-spoken languages worldwide. Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions from 500 BC have been found on Adichanallur and 2,200-year-old Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions have been found on Samanamalai. A study conducted by Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History found that the Dravidian language family, of which Tamil is a part, may be approximately 4000-4500 years old, which includes a number of languages native mostly to southern and eastern India, it is also the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu. Researchers have found inscriptions in Tamil dating back to the 3rd century BCE, and it has been in continuous use ever since. Unlike Sanskrit, another ancient Indian language that fell out of common usage around 600 BCE and became mostly a liturgical language, Tamil has continued to develop and is now the 20th most commonly-spoken language in the world. Hebrew Unlike others, Hebrew essentially fell out of common usage around 400 CE and then remained preserved as a liturgical language for Jews across the world. However, along with the rise of Zionism in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hebrew went through a revival process to become the official language of Israel. While the modern version differs from the Biblical version, native speakers of Hebrew can fully comprehend what is written in the Old Testament and its connected texts. As the earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew often had Yiddish as their native language, Modern Hebrew has in many ways been influenced by this other Jewish language. Farsi Farsi, with native speakers around 60 million in 2009, is a language spoken in modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, among other places. People have heard of Persian, and it’s actually the same language, under a different name. Farsi is the direct descendant of Old Persian, which was the language of the Persian Empire. Modern Persian took form around 800 CE, and one of the things that differentiate it from many modern languages is that it has changed relatively little since then. Speakers of Persian today could pick up a piece of writing from 900 CE and read it with considerably less difficulty than an English speaker could read Shakespeare. View in Publication Site