The idea of an oldest language raises a question which is at first sight unanswerable. There cannot be any such thing. Over ten thousand years a language changes to the point that only highly skilled specialists can see any connection between the two ends ot the process, a maximal then and now. By the latest calculation, by Shigeru Miyagawa and others (2025), modern language has been spoken for around 135,000 years, enough time for 13 then and nows. It is not known how many populations of ancestral humans there were across Africa at that time. There may have been a number of languages, possibly more than 10,000 years apart from one another, unrelated by modern conceptions. But by the proposal here, the idea of an oldest language can be reversed. There has to have been a first step towards the evolution of modern speech and language, and its key properties can be deduced partly by the observation of modern children about the age of a year and partly by modern mathematical techniques.
The Bible and the Koran
Mediaeval scholars of the Bible thought that Hebrew had to be the world’s first language because it seemed to have been spoken before there was any record of any European language, as spoken in the Middle Ages. But they had no idea of the true age of the earth or the length of human history. There were no words for million, let alone billion. No one had thought of trying to count the grains of rice in a shipload. Counting the sacks was good enough.
Both the Bible and the Koran trace the origin of language back to the origin of humanity, seeing language as words, but without specifying which language the words were part of, or how this insight related to the ways that words are put together.
But the notion of simultaneous origins of language and humanity is either a very ancient one, or, for Christians, Jews and Moslems, a divine truth.
By the proposal here, the question of how human language originated and evolved is in fact crucial for speech and language pathology.
Out of Africa
The issue here was sharpened by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859: Did human language originate in Africa? Such questions led to a flurry of speculation, leading to a ban seven years later by the Société de Linguistique de Paris on any discussion of language evolution. If, as Darwin guessed, humans originated in Africa, did language originate in Africa too? As noted by Salikoko Mufwene (2013) – he is a died-in-the-wool opponent of the framework here – the anxiety of the Société de Linguistique may have stemmed from the realisation that if language originated in Africa, it was bequeathed to humanity by Africans. Some members of the Société de Linguistique may have been less than happy about any such thought. The ban silenced scientific debate until Lenneberg (1967) brought the topic back to life with an appendix by Noam Chomsky.
Now the overwhelming weight of genetic and paleoanthropological evidence suggests that Darwin was completely right on the point that language, like the human species itself, originated in Africa. Call this the ‘Out of Africa Hypothesis’. David Reich (2018) complicates the picture with his demonstration that there was some migration back into Africa after the exodus of modern humans around 70,000 years ago. But from various sorts of evidence, including stone tools in dateable deposits, by the work of Curtis Marean and his colleagues (2007), a population living on what was then a South African shoreline between 130,000 and 175,000 years ago was able to anneal flint, heating it red hot and letting it cool slowly over a period of a day or so. Such a technology requires an understanding of heat and accurate control of fire. This would be especially challenging without instruments or industrial / laboratory apparatus. Large lumps of red hot flint are lethally dangerous. Ancient health and safety committees had their work cut out. It seems to me, as it does to Marean, that such a population must have had a fully developed competence in language. If that thinking is on the right lines, the last step of human language evolution must have been completed by that point. This is confirmed by the work of Shigeru Miyagawa and his colleagues (2025) who propose that modern human language was probably about where it is today by around 135,000 years ago. There is no way of telling what the speech sounded like, although it may have had a large inventory of speech sounds, some with complex articulations like some of the so-called ‘click languages’ still spoken in Southern Africa.
In this connection, it is important to take account of the time scale involved here – in the hundreds of thousands of years, or many thousands of human generations. Language evolution has to have been a slow process, at least a thousand times slower than anything observable in a human lifetime or even by folk memory.
Proto-Indo-European and language change
All but one of the languages spoken in Western Europe have developed on an entirely different time scale, in single thousands of years, in some cases less than a thousand years. Apart from Basque, 300 odd languages (some now dead) from Western Europe and from Kurdistan and Iran to Northern India are thought to have originated somewhere close to the Black Sea perhaps 6,500 years ago. This language is known as ‘Proto-Indo-European’ or PIE. Going back another 2,500 years, there may have been an ancestral form of PIE including modern Hungarian and Finnish, known as ‘Proto-Indo-Uralic’ PIU. There is no reason for not assuming that PIE and PIU were already fully developed modern languages, before they started developing in separate directions into the languages of Europe, Northern India, and the ancient Middle East.
PIE, about which the evidence is much clearer and better established than that for PIU, was ancestral to Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Latin, and gradually diverged more widely. The idea of this ancestry we owe to William Jones in 1786. Although others had seen the connections, it was Jones who both identified criteria still broadly accepted today for genetic relationships between languages. What we still have from PIE are the terms for numbers, members of the family, personal pronouns like thee and me, words for snow, bodies of water, and other terms relating to love, life and death.
This process is often described and illustrated graphically by the branching of a tree, with ‘Romance’ languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, Celtic languages once spoken in Britany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, Nordic languages, spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Faroes, Iceland, Slavic languages including Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Czech, and so on, all on their own branches. But there is one glaring counter-example, English. Modern English represents not just branching but a growing back together, which has happened in very complex ways from the end of the Roman occupation in 410 and at least to the Norman conquest in 1066, and possibly for another 500 or so years, as the class demographics reacted to phenomena such as the Black Death which killed almost half the population.
At every point populations came together speaking different Western descendent forms of PIE, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, French, Nordic, Italian, without the speakers realising that what seemed to them like entirely different languages in fact had a common ancestry. Since the 1960s, there have been waves of immigration from czarist Russia, from the Nazis, and from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, West Africa and the Caribbean. In many cases, the immigrants have brought with them different forms of PIE descendent. The tree metaphor is profoundly misleading.
It is generally, though not universally, believed that it is possible to trace back the history of a language to around 9 or 10.000 years, but not more. But the changes brought about by demographics are observable in a human lifetime.
Time scales