Language is an essential part of human communication. As per an estimate, 7,168 languages are spoken in the world and nearly 40 percent of them are considered endangered
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Some languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, while more than half of the world's population uses one of just 23 tongues
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But what is the oldest of them? While we can't really know what's the first language ever spoken, linguists and historians agree that these are the oldest languages:
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1. Spoken predominantly in southern India and Sri Lanka, Tamil is one of the oldest classical languages in the world, with a literary tradition spanning over two millennia
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2. An ancient Indo-Aryan language of India, Sanskrit is known as the language of classical Hindu philosophy, literature, and religious texts such as the Vedas and Upanishads
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3. Ancient Egyptian, particularly its written form in hieroglyphs, is one of the earliest known languages, with inscriptions dating back to around 3200 BCE
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4. An ancient Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia, Akkadian was used as a lingua franca in the region from around 2500 BCE and was the language of the Epic of Gilgamesh
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5. The written Chinese language has a continuous history of more than 3,000 years, with Classical Chinese texts dating back to the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE)
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6. The language of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), Hebrew has been spoken for several thousand years, with a revived form used as the official language of Israel today
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7. Ancient Greek has a documented history spanning over 3,000 years, from the Mycenaean civilization of the 16th century BCE to its modern form spoken today in Greece and Cyprus