{ "title": "languages.lat — an archive of human language", "license": "Free to reuse with attribution; dates are approximate and hedged by design.", "count": 251, "languages": [ { "id": "sentinelese", "name": "Sentinelese", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Spoken today — never recorded", "displayYear": "Today", "sortYear": 2026, "region": "South Asia", "place": "North Sentinel Island, Andaman Islands", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": "Possibly related to Andamanese languages", "script": "None — entirely unwritten", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "living", "evidence": "spoken", "blurb": "A reminder of how much remains unknown: the Sentinelese have refused all contact, and no outsider has ever documented a single confirmed word of their language. A living language, spoken right now, about which linguistics knows essentially nothing.", "datingNote": "Its relationship to other Andamanese languages is pure conjecture — the islanders' isolation may span tens of thousands of years." }, { "id": "toki-pona", "name": "Toki Pona", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Published 2001", "displayYear": "2001", "sortYear": 2001, "region": "Worldwide / Constructed", "place": "Toronto — by Sonja Lang", "family": "Constructed", "branch": "Philosophical minimal language", "script": "Latin alphabet & sitelen pona glyphs", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "constructed", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "A language of about 120 words, designed to ask how little is enough: complex ideas must be rebuilt from simple pieces, so a 'friend' is jan pona — 'good person'. Created as a personal meditation, it now has thousands of speakers and an ISO code — the smallest living language ever made.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "nicaraguan-sign-language", "name": "Nicaraguan Sign Language", "endonym": "Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua", "timeLabel": "Emerged c. 1980s", "displayYear": "c. 1980s", "sortYear": 1985, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Managua, Nicaragua", "family": "Sign language", "branch": "Language isolate (signed)", "script": "Signed — no traditional script", "scriptGroup": "Signed", "status": "living", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "The only time in history that scientists watched a full language be born. When deaf children were first brought together in Managua's new schools, they spontaneously built a grammar out of nothing — proof that the human mind generates language on its own.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "klingon", "name": "Klingon", "endonym": "tlhIngan Hol", "timeLabel": "Created 1984", "displayYear": "1984", "sortYear": 1984, "region": "Worldwide / Constructed", "place": "Hollywood — by linguist Marc Okrand", "family": "Constructed", "branch": "Artistic language", "script": "Latin transliteration (pIqaD glyphs)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "constructed", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "Built for Star Trek by a real linguist who made it deliberately alien — object-verb-subject word order, sounds picked for rarity. Klingon now has opera, Hamlet, and a handful of fluent speakers: the best-developed proof that humans will acquire any system with enough structure and love.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "piraha", "name": "Pirahã", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Documented in the 20th century", "displayYear": "c. 1960s", "sortYear": 1960, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Maici River, Brazilian Amazon", "family": "Mura", "branch": null, "script": "Unwritten", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A few hundred speakers on an Amazon tributary became the centre of linguistics' fiercest modern fight: researcher Daniel Everett claimed Pirahã lacks recursion, numbers, and colour terms — striking at Chomsky's universal grammar. The debate over one small language reshaped a whole field's questions.", "datingNote": "Everett's claims remain contested; access to the Pirahã for independent verification has been limited, keeping the controversy alive." }, { "id": "hmong", "name": "Hmong", "endonym": "Hmoob / 𖬌𖬣𖬵", "timeLabel": "First adequate scripts, 1950s", "displayYear": "c. 1950s", "sortYear": 1955, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Southern China, Laos, Vietnam; global diaspora", "family": "Hmong–Mien", "branch": null, "script": "Latin (RPA, 1953) & Pahawh Hmong (1959)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Flagship of the Hmong–Mien family, whose dense tones colour southern China's hills. In 1959 Shong Lue Yang, an unlettered farmer, produced Pahawh Hmong — a script of remarkable originality that gathered such a following that he was assassinated in 1971: a writing system with a martyr.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "enga", "name": "Enga", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "First written c. mid-20th century", "displayYear": "c. 1950s", "sortYear": 1950, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Highlands of Papua New Guinea", "family": "Trans–New Guinea", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The largest native language of Papua New Guinea represents Trans–New Guinea — one of the world's biggest language families, and among its least known. Its speakers' highland valleys, home to a million farmers, were unknown to the outside world until gold prospectors walked in during the 1930s.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "manding-bambara-maninka", "name": "Manding (Bambara–Maninka)", "endonym": "ߒߞߏ / Bamanankan", "timeLabel": "N'Ko alphabet created 1949", "displayYear": "1949", "sortYear": 1949, "region": "Africa", "place": "Mali, Guinea & the Manding world", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Mande", "script": "N'Ko (right-to-left); Latin & Ajami also", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Heirs of the Mali Empire, whose griots have chanted the Epic of Sunjata since the 13th century. In 1949 the Guinean scholar Solomana Kante, stung by claims that African languages could not be written, created the N'Ko alphabet — today it powers a thriving literature and Wikipedia edition.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "macedonian", "name": "Macedonian", "endonym": "Македонски јазик", "timeLabel": "Standardized 1945", "displayYear": "1945", "sortYear": 1945, "region": "Europe", "place": "North Macedonia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (South)", "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Europe's youngest standard language: codified in 1945, choosing dialects that sat deliberately between Serbian and Bulgarian. The speech itself is as old as any Slavic — Cyril and Methodius based Old Church Slavonic partly on 9th-century dialects of this very region.", "datingNote": "Its status is politically contested by neighbours; linguistically it is a distinct South Slavic standard on a dialect continuum." }, { "id": "ket", "name": "Ket", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "First written in the 1930s", "displayYear": "c. 1930s", "sortYear": 1930, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Yenisei River, central Siberia", "family": "Yeniseian", "branch": null, "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Perhaps a hundred elderly speakers on the Yenisei carry the last Yeniseian language — and possibly the far end of the deepest language link ever proposed: the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis ties Ket to Navajo and Tlingit across the Bering Strait, some 12,000 years of separation.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "chukchi", "name": "Chukchi", "endonym": "Ԓыгъоравэтԓьэн йиԓыйиԓ", "timeLabel": "Tenevil's script c. 1927; Cyrillic from 1930s", "displayYear": "c. 1927", "sortYear": 1927, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Chukotka, far northeastern Siberia", "family": "Chukotko-Kamchatkan", "branch": null, "script": "Cyrillic (Tenevil's pictographs briefly)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Around 1927 a reindeer herder named Tenevil, who had never seen writing work, invented his own script for Chukchi from scratch — one of the only spontaneous inventions of writing ever witnessed. His boards and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family both now hover near extinction.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "santali", "name": "Santali", "endonym": "ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ", "timeLabel": "Ol Chiki script created 1925", "displayYear": "1925", "sortYear": 1925, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Jharkhand, West Bengal & Odisha, India", "family": "Austroasiatic", "branch": "Munda", "script": "Ol Chiki (invented by Raghunath Murmu)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Proof that Austroasiatic reaches deep into India: Santali's seven million speakers are cousins-in-language to Khmer and Vietnamese. Missionary alphabets never fit its sounds, so in 1925 Raghunath Murmu invented Ol Chiki — its letter shapes drawn from everyday Santal life.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "somali", "name": "Somali", "endonym": "Af-Soomaali", "timeLabel": "Osmanya script 1920s; Latin official 1972", "displayYear": "c. 1922", "sortYear": 1922, "region": "Africa", "place": "Somalia & the Horn of Africa", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Cushitic", "script": "Latin (Osmanya & Arabic historically)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The great Cushitic language of the Horn, heir to one of the world's most demanding oral poetics — Somali verse requires strict alliteration sustained for hundreds of lines, and master poets were public powers. Osman Yusuf Kenadid invented the Osmanya script for it in the 1920s; Latin won in 1972.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "navajo", "name": "Navajo", "endonym": "Diné bizaad", "timeLabel": "First systematically written c. 1900s", "displayYear": "c. 1900s", "sortYear": 1907, "region": "The Americas", "place": "American Southwest", "family": "Na-Dené", "branch": "Athabaskan", "script": "Latin alphabet (modern orthography 1930s)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The most-spoken Indigenous language north of Mexico, famous as the unbreakable code of WWII's Navajo Code Talkers. The Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis controversially links its family to languages of Siberia — possibly the deepest language connection ever demonstrated across continents.", "datingNote": "The language itself is far older than its first writing; Athabaskan speakers reached the Southwest around 1400 CE after a long migration from the subarctic." }, { "id": "dinka", "name": "Dinka", "endonym": "Thuɔŋjäŋ", "timeLabel": "First written c. early 20th century", "displayYear": "c. 1900s", "sortYear": 1905, "region": "Africa", "place": "South Sudan — the Nile floodplains", "family": "Nilo-Saharan (proposed)", "branch": "Nilotic", "script": "Latin alphabet (extended)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The great cattle-keeping language of the Nile floodplains, representing Nilotic — the family that also produced the famously tall Maasai and the world's fastest marathoners' mother tongues. Dinka song-duels and ox-names encode a pastoral poetry older than any written record of it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "modern-hebrew", "name": "Modern Hebrew", "endonym": "עברית — Ivrit", "timeLabel": "Revived c. 1880s–1920s", "displayYear": "c. 1900", "sortYear": 1900, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Ottoman & Mandate Palestine", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Canaanite", "script": "Hebrew square script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "revived", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "The only full revival of a dead vernacular in recorded history. Hebrew ceased to be anyone's mother tongue around 200 CE, survived seventeen centuries in prayer and scholarship, and was deliberately re-engineered into a living language — now spoken natively by millions.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "oromo", "name": "Oromo", "endonym": "Afaan Oromoo", "timeLabel": "Bible translation 1899; Latin qubee from 1991", "displayYear": "1899", "sortYear": 1899, "region": "Africa", "place": "Ethiopia & northern Kenya", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Cushitic", "script": "Latin (qubee)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Spoken by more people than any other language of Ethiopia, yet barely written until Onesimos Nesib — enslaved as a child, freed, and trained as a translator — produced an Oromo Bible in 1899. For most of the 20th century publishing in Oromo was restricted; the qubee alphabet of 1991 ended the silence.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "shona", "name": "Shona", "endonym": "chiShona", "timeLabel": "First written in the 1890s", "displayYear": "c. 1890s", "sortYear": 1892, "region": "Africa", "place": "Zimbabwe", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Bantu", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The majority language of Zimbabwe, whose speakers' ancestors raised the stone city of Great Zimbabwe — the largest ruins in sub-Saharan Africa, built without writing and once absurdly credited to outsiders. Shona's mbira music and praise poetry carried the record instead.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "esperanto", "name": "Esperanto", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Published 1887", "displayYear": "1887", "sortYear": 1887, "region": "Worldwide / Constructed", "place": "Białystok (then Russian Empire), by L. L. Zamenhof", "family": "Constructed", "branch": "A-posteriori, European-derived vocabulary", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "constructed", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "The most successful invented language ever, designed as a politically neutral second tongue for humanity. It never united the world, but it did something no other constructed language has: it acquired native speakers — perhaps a thousand people raised in Esperanto today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tok-pisin", "name": "Tok Pisin", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Formed c. 1860–1900", "displayYear": "c. 1880", "sortYear": 1880, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Melanesian plantations; now Papua New Guinea", "family": "Creole", "branch": "English-lexified Pacific creole", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "Born on colonial plantations where workers speaking hundreds of languages needed common ground, Tok Pisin grew from makeshift pidgin into a full mother tongue. It is now the great lingua franca of Papua New Guinea — the most linguistically diverse nation on Earth, with 800+ languages.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "burushaski", "name": "Burushaski", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "First documented in the 19th century", "displayYear": "c. 1880s", "sortYear": 1880, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Hunza & Nagar valleys, Karakoram, Pakistan", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Mostly unwritten; Urdu-based attempts", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "High in the Karakoram, walled by glaciers, ~100,000 people speak a language related to nothing: not Indo-European, not Sino-Tibetan, not Dravidian. Burushaski is likely a survivor of whatever was spoken before all of those arrived — a mountain island of pre-history.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "volapuk", "name": "Volapük", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Published 1879–1880", "displayYear": "1880", "sortYear": 1879, "region": "Worldwide / Constructed", "place": "Konstanz, Germany — by Johann Martin Schleyer", "family": "Constructed", "branch": "A-priori/a-posteriori mix", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "constructed", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "The first constructed language to go viral: a German priest built Volapük after — he said — God told him to in a dream, and within a decade it claimed hundreds of thousands of students and three world congresses. Then Esperanto arrived, simpler and friendlier, and Volapük collapsed within years.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "inuktitut", "name": "Inuktitut", "endonym": "ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ", "timeLabel": "Syllabics adopted c. 1870s", "displayYear": "c. 1870s", "sortYear": 1870, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Canadian Arctic", "family": "Inuit–Yupik–Unangan", "branch": "Inuit", "script": "Inuktitut syllabics (adapted from Cree syllabics)", "scriptGroup": "Syllabaries", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the eastern Arctic, written in an elegant geometric syllabary adapted from James Evans' Cree script. Its famously rich word-building can pack an entire sentence into a single word — a structure called polysynthesis.", "datingNote": "Spoken across the Arctic for roughly a thousand years, since the Thule migration eastward from Alaska." }, { "id": "abkhaz", "name": "Abkhaz", "endonym": "Аԥсуа бызшәа — Apsua byzšwa", "timeLabel": "First alphabet 1862", "displayYear": "1862", "sortYear": 1863, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "Abkhazia, Black Sea coast", "family": "Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz–Adyghe)", "branch": null, "script": "Cyrillic (extended)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A phonetic skyscraper: Abkhaz crams nearly sixty consonants against just two real vowels, a ratio almost unmatched on Earth. Its Northwest Caucasian family also included Ubykh — with over eighty consonants — whose last speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died in 1992.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "chechen", "name": "Chechen", "endonym": "Нохчийн мотт — Noxçiyn mott", "timeLabel": "First systematically written 1862", "displayYear": "1862", "sortYear": 1862, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "Chechnya, North Caucasus", "family": "Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian)", "branch": null, "script": "Cyrillic (Arabic and Latin historically)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Flagship of the Nakh–Dagestanian family — one of the Caucasus's two indigenous families with no proven relatives anywhere. Dagestan alone packs some thirty of its languages into one small republic, the densest concentration of unrelated speech in Europe's neighbourhood.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "zulu", "name": "Zulu", "endonym": "isiZulu", "timeLabel": "First written c. 1850s", "displayYear": "c. 1850s", "sortYear": 1855, "region": "Africa", "place": "KwaZulu-Natal, southern Africa", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Bantu (Nguni)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "South Africa's most widely spoken home language, famous for its click consonants borrowed from neighbouring Khoisan languages — a rare and beautiful record of ancient contact between two utterly different language worlds.", "datingNote": "The written date is misleadingly recent: Zulu descends from Proto-Bantu speech dating back thousands of years." }, { "id": "norwegian", "name": "Norwegian", "endonym": "Norsk", "timeLabel": "Modern standards from the 1850s; Old Norwegian from c. 1100s", "displayYear": "c. 1850s", "sortYear": 1850, "region": "Europe", "place": "Norway", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "After four centuries under Danish rule and a Danish pen, Norway rebuilt written Norwegian twice at once: Bokmål, norwegianized from Danish, and Nynorsk, which Ivar Aasen distilled from rural dialects in the 1850s. Both remain official — one speech community, two competing spellings of it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "nigerian-pidgin-naija", "name": "Nigerian Pidgin (Naijá)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Coastal origins 17th–18th c.; exploded in the 20th", "displayYear": "c. 1800s", "sortYear": 1848, "region": "Africa", "place": "Nigeria", "family": "Creole", "branch": "English-lexified Atlantic creole", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "spoken", "blurb": "Possibly the most-spoken creole on Earth: perhaps a hundred million Nigerians use Naijá daily, and for millions of children it is now a mother tongue. Born in coastal trade centuries ago, it has its own BBC news service and an exuberant music industry — a creole becoming a national language in real time.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "yoruba", "name": "Yoruba", "endonym": "Èdè Yorùbá", "timeLabel": "First written c. 1840s", "displayYear": "c. 1840s", "sortYear": 1843, "region": "Africa", "place": "Southwestern Nigeria & Benin", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Volta–Niger", "script": "Latin alphabet (orthography by Samuel Ajayi Crowther)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "One of Africa's great tonal languages, first written by Samuel Ajayi Crowther — a freed slave who became a bishop and linguist. Its oral tradition is ancient: the sacred city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ flourished centuries before a word of Yoruba was ever written, and Yoruba ritual language crossed the Atlantic in Santería and Candomblé.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "slovak", "name": "Slovak", "endonym": "Slovenčina", "timeLabel": "Standardized 1843; earlier texts from the 15th century", "displayYear": "1843", "sortYear": 1843, "region": "Europe", "place": "Slovakia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Slovak speech is medieval, but the written standard is a documented act of will: in 1843 Ľudovít Štúr and colleagues met and chose the central dialects as the basis of a national language — one of the clearest recorded moments of a language being deliberately given its modern form.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "lakota", "name": "Lakota", "endonym": "Lakȟótiyapi", "timeLabel": "Written by the 1830s–50s", "displayYear": "c. 1840s", "sortYear": 1843, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Northern Great Plains, USA", "family": "Siouan", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, flagship of the Siouan family that once rang across the Plains. Winter counts — painted hide calendars naming each year by its defining event — kept Lakota history without writing; today about two thousand speakers anchor an urgent revival.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "cree", "name": "Cree", "endonym": "ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ — Nēhiyawēwin", "timeLabel": "Syllabics from 1840", "displayYear": "1840", "sortYear": 1841, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Canada — from Labrador to the Rockies", "family": "Algonquian", "branch": null, "script": "Cree syllabics & Latin", "scriptGroup": "Syllabaries", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "When syllabics reached the Cree in 1840, literacy spread from camp to camp faster than schools could ever have carried it — within a generation the Cree were among the most literate peoples on Earth. Cree tradition credits the script to the visionary Calling Badger; missionary James Evans printed it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "akan-twi-fante", "name": "Akan (Twi–Fante)", "endonym": "Akan kasa", "timeLabel": "Mission primers by the 1840s; fragments from the 1760s", "displayYear": "c. 1840s", "sortYear": 1840, "region": "Africa", "place": "Ghana & Côte d'Ivoire", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Kwa", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Ashanti kingdom, whose adinkra symbols — each a proverb made visible — still pattern cloth worldwide. Akan day-names crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved: Kofi Annan and the folk-hero spider Anansi both carry them.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "fijian", "name": "Fijian", "endonym": "Na vosa vaka-Viti", "timeLabel": "First written 1835", "displayYear": "1835", "sortYear": 1835, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Fiji", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Oceanic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "When missionaries devised Fijian spelling in 1835, they made an elegant choice: single letters for the language's prenasalised sounds — so 'b' says mb, and 'Beqa' reads Mbengga. Fijian stands near the source of the great Oceanic dispersal that peopled Polynesia.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "samoan", "name": "Samoan", "endonym": "Gagana Sāmoa", "timeLabel": "First written c. 1834", "displayYear": "c. 1834", "sortYear": 1834, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Samoa", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Polynesian", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "One of Polynesia's anchor languages, its oratory a formal art with its own ceremonial register — chiefly Samoan — that operates almost as a second vocabulary. Missionary printing from the 1830s made Samoa one of the Pacific's earliest mass-literate societies.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "vai", "name": "Vai", "endonym": "ꕙꔤ", "timeLabel": "Script devised c. 1833", "displayYear": "c. 1833", "sortYear": 1833, "region": "Africa", "place": "Liberia", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Mande", "script": "Vai syllabary — invented by Momolu Duwalu Bukele", "scriptGroup": "Syllabaries", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "When Momolu Duwalu Bukele devised a syllabary for his own language — reportedly after a dream — he created one of the first modern African scripts invented entirely independently of missionaries. It sparked a wave of indigenous West African writing systems and is still used today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "malagasy", "name": "Malagasy", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Latin orthography 1823; Sorabe manuscripts earlier", "displayYear": "1823", "sortYear": 1823, "region": "Africa", "place": "Madagascar", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Malayo-Polynesian (Barito)", "script": "Latin (Arabic-script Sorabe before)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The genetic surprise of Africa: Malagasy's closest relatives are spoken in southern Borneo, 7,500 kilometres away — outrigger sailors crossed the entire Indian Ocean around the mid-first millennium CE. King Radama I fixed its Latin spelling in 1823 with missionary help.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "hawaiian", "name": "Hawaiian", "endonym": "ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi", "timeLabel": "First written 1822", "displayYear": "1822", "sortYear": 1822, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Hawaiian Islands", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Polynesian", "script": "Latin alphabet (13 letters)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "With only eight consonants, Hawaiian has one of the smallest sound inventories on Earth. Nearly silenced in the 20th century, it is now the flagship of language revitalisation — immersion schools have raised a new generation of native speakers.", "datingNote": "Spoken origin is far older: Polynesian voyagers settled Hawaiʻi around 1000–1200 CE, a date still refined by archaeology." }, { "id": "cherokee", "name": "Cherokee", "endonym": "ᏣᎳᎩ — Tsalagi", "timeLabel": "First written 1821", "displayYear": "1821", "sortYear": 1821, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Southeastern United States", "family": "Iroquoian", "branch": "Southern Iroquoian", "script": "Cherokee syllabary — invented by Sequoyah", "scriptGroup": "Syllabaries", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Sequoyah, who could not read any language, single-handedly invented a complete writing system — one of the only documented cases of an individual creating literacy for their people from scratch. Within years, Cherokee literacy rates surpassed those of surrounding settlers.", "datingNote": "The spoken language is many centuries older; Iroquoian languages diverged over 3,000 years ago." }, { "id": "american-sign-language", "name": "American Sign Language", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Emerged c. 1817", "displayYear": "c. 1817", "sortYear": 1817, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Hartford, Connecticut", "family": "Sign language", "branch": "French Sign Language family", "script": "Signed — no traditional script", "scriptGroup": "Signed", "status": "living", "evidence": "observed", "blurb": "Born when French Sign Language met local home-sign systems — including the remarkable village sign language of Martha's Vineyard, where deafness was so common that everyone signed. ASL is a full natural language with its own grammar, entirely independent of English.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "maori", "name": "Māori", "endonym": "Te Reo Māori", "timeLabel": "First written c. 1815", "displayYear": "c. 1815", "sortYear": 1815, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Aotearoa New Zealand", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Polynesian", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the last great landmass humans ever settled — Māori ancestors reached New Zealand around 1250–1300 CE, the final leap of the Austronesian expansion. Its modern revival, powered by kōhanga reo ('language nests'), is a model studied worldwide.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "ukrainian", "name": "Ukrainian", "endonym": "Українська мова", "timeLabel": "Modern literary language from 1798", "displayYear": "1798", "sortYear": 1798, "region": "Europe", "place": "Ukraine", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (East)", "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Kotliarevsky's Eneida of 1798 — a riotous parody of Virgil in the living speech of Ukrainian villages — founded the modern literary language. Its deeper roots run through the Ruthenian chancery language and back to the same Old East Slavic written in medieval Kyiv itself.", "datingNote": "Dating 'Ukrainian' depends on definitions: the East Slavic of 11th-century Kyiv is ancestral to Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian alike; 1798 marks the modern literary standard." }, { "id": "fula-fulfulde", "name": "Fula (Fulfulde)", "endonym": "Fulfulde / Pulaar / 𞤊𞤵𞤤𞤬𞤵𞤤𞤣𞤫", "timeLabel": "Ajami poetry by c. the late 18th century", "displayYear": "c. 1790s", "sortYear": 1790, "region": "Africa", "place": "The Sahel — Senegal to Sudan", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Senegambian", "script": "Latin, Arabic (Ajami) & Adlam", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of Sahel herders scattered across twenty countries, written in Arabic script by the scholars of the Sokoto jihad. Then in 1989 two Guinean teenagers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, invented the Adlam alphabet for it at their kitchen table — it is now in Unicode and on smartphones.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "igbo", "name": "Igbo", "endonym": "Asụsụ Igbo", "timeLabel": "Wordlists from 1777", "displayYear": "1777", "sortYear": 1777, "region": "Africa", "place": "Southeastern Nigeria", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Volta–Niger", "script": "Latin alphabet (Nsibidi symbols traditionally)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "First recorded from the mouths of enslaved Igbo in the Caribbean — a 1777 Moravian wordlist — and now spoken by over thirty million. Igbo country also kept nsibidi, an indigenous symbol system of secret societies: not full writing, but a graphic tradition centuries older than colonial literacy.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "guugu-yimithirr", "name": "Guugu Yimithirr", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "First recorded 1770", "displayYear": "1770", "sortYear": 1770, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Cape York, Queensland, Australia", "family": "Pama–Nyungan", "branch": "Yimidhirr–Yalanji–Yidinic", "script": "Unwritten until modern times; Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "When James Cook's crew wrote down 'kangooroo' in 1770, it became the first Australian language ever recorded — after humans had already spoken on the continent for some 50,000 years or more. That gap, between first speech and first record, is the largest known on Earth.", "datingNote": "Australia's languages are among humanity's oldest continuous traditions, yet none was written before the 18th century — a stark illustration of how little of language history writing captures." }, { "id": "british-sign-language", "name": "British Sign Language", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Deaf schooling from 1760; earlier signing recorded", "displayYear": "c. 1760", "sortYear": 1760, "region": "Europe", "place": "Britain", "family": "Sign language", "branch": "BANZSL family", "script": "Signed — no script", "scriptGroup": "Signed", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Proof that sign languages are not universal: BSL and American Sign Language are mutually unintelligible — ASL descends from French signing, BSL from Britain's own deaf communities, documented since a 1576 wedding conducted in signs. Braidwood's Edinburgh academy (1760) made it a language of education.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "wolof", "name": "Wolof", "endonym": "Wolof làkk", "timeLabel": "Ajami manuscripts by c. the 18th century", "displayYear": "c. 1700s", "sortYear": 1750, "region": "Africa", "place": "Senegal & Gambia", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Senegambian", "script": "Latin & Arabic (Wolofal)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The street language of Dakar and the pulse of Senegal, long written in Arabic letters (Wolofal) by Sufi scholars. Wolof gave global culture a word it never credits: 'banana' likely passed through it — and the American 'OK' has been argued, more controversially, to echo Wolof 'waaw-kay'.", "datingNote": "The Wolof origin of 'OK' is a popular claim most etymologists reject; 'banana' too is debated among West African sources. Word histories are as contested as language ones." }, { "id": "greenlandic", "name": "Greenlandic", "endonym": "Kalaallisut", "timeLabel": "Written from the 1750s", "displayYear": "c. 1750", "sortYear": 1750, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Greenland", "family": "Inuit–Yupik–Unangan", "branch": "Inuit", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The only Indigenous language of the Americas that is the true official language of its country: Kalaallisut governs, broadcasts, and schools Greenland. Its single-word sentences run famously long — a full clause of meaning folded into one polysynthetic word.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "haitian-creole", "name": "Haitian Creole", "endonym": "Kreyòl Ayisyen", "timeLabel": "Formed c. 1700s", "displayYear": "c. 1700s", "sortYear": 1740, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Saint-Domingue (Haiti)", "family": "Creole", "branch": "French-lexified Atlantic creole", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "spoken", "blurb": "Forged in the brutal crucible of Caribbean plantations, where enslaved West Africans reshaped French vocabulary with African grammar. Today it is the most widely spoken creole in the world and a co-official language of Haiti — living proof that new languages keep being born.", "datingNote": "Creoles crystallise over generations; the 18th-century date marks a gradual emergence, not a single moment." }, { "id": "swahili", "name": "Swahili", "endonym": "Kiswahili", "timeLabel": "Manuscripts by c. 1711", "displayYear": "c. 1711", "sortYear": 1711, "region": "Africa", "place": "East African coast — Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Bantu (Sabaki)", "script": "Arabic (Ajami), later Latin", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Africa's great lingua franca, spoken by perhaps 200 million people. A Bantu language enriched by centuries of Indian Ocean trade with Arabic, Persian, and later Portuguese and English — the linguistic signature of the Swahili coast's cosmopolitan city-states.", "datingNote": "The earliest surviving manuscripts are 18th-century, but Swahili coastal society — and almost certainly the language — dates back to at least the 8th century CE." }, { "id": "rongorongo-rapa-nui", "name": "Rongorongo (Rapa Nui)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Tablets documented 1860s; origin debated", "displayYear": "c. 1700s?", "sortYear": 1700, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Rapa Nui (Easter Island)", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Eastern Polynesian", "script": "Rongorongo glyphs — undeciphered", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Wooden tablets covered in glyphs of birds, fish, and dancing figures — and no one can read them. If rongorongo predates European contact, it would be one of only a handful of times writing was invented independently in all of human history.", "datingNote": "Fiercely debated: some scholars argue the script was inspired by seeing Spanish writing in 1770; others argue for an earlier, independent origin. The last islanders who could read it died in the 19th century." }, { "id": "wampanoag-massachusett", "name": "Wampanoag (Massachusett)", "endonym": "Wôpanâak", "timeLabel": "Eliot Bible 1663; reclaimed from the 1990s", "displayYear": "1663", "sortYear": 1663, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Massachusetts coast, USA", "family": "Algonquian", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "revived", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The first Bible printed in the Americas (1663) was not in English but in Massachusett — and that book became a resurrection machine: after the language fell silent for over a century, Jessie Little Doe Baird's Wôpanâak project rebuilt it from colonial documents. Children now grow up speaking it again.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "khoekhoe-nama", "name": "Khoekhoe (Nama)", "endonym": "Khoekhoegowab", "timeLabel": "Wordlists from the 17th century", "displayYear": "c. 1660", "sortYear": 1660, "region": "Africa", "place": "Namibia, Botswana & South Africa", "family": "Khoe–Kwadi", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet (with click letters ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The largest surviving click language, whose alphabet includes ǀ ǁ ǃ ǂ for four kinds of click. The 'Khoisan' languages are not one family but several unrelated ones — among them Tuu, whose ǃXóõ packs over a hundred distinct sounds, the richest inventory ever recorded.", "datingNote": "Southern Africa's click languages predate the Bantu expansion by millennia; most are now endangered or gone, taking unrecorded deep history with them." }, { "id": "ainu", "name": "Ainu", "endonym": "アイヌ・イタㇰ — Aynu itak", "timeLabel": "First recorded 17th century", "displayYear": "c. 1600s", "sortYear": 1650, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, Kuril Islands", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Historically unwritten; katakana & Latin today", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A language isolate with no proven relatives anywhere on Earth, carried by the Indigenous people of northern Japan. Its vast oral epics, the yukar, preserved history and myth entirely by memory. Today only a handful of native speakers remain, amid determined revival efforts.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "kanuri", "name": "Kanuri", "endonym": "Kanembu", "timeLabel": "Old Kanembu glosses in manuscripts from c. the 17th century", "displayYear": "c. 1650", "sortYear": 1650, "region": "Africa", "place": "Lake Chad basin — Nigeria, Niger, Chad", "family": "Nilo-Saharan (proposed)", "branch": "Saharan", "script": "Arabic (Ajami) & Latin", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Kanem–Bornu empire, which flourished by Lake Chad for a thousand years. Qur'ans from its schools carry interlinear glosses in Old Kanembu — some scholars argue the glossing tradition itself reaches back centuries earlier, making it one of Africa's oldest written vernaculars.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "hausa", "name": "Hausa", "endonym": "Harshen Hausa", "timeLabel": "Ajami manuscripts by c. 17th century", "displayYear": "c. 1600s", "sortYear": 1640, "region": "Africa", "place": "Northern Nigeria & Niger, Sahel", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Chadic", "script": "Arabic (Ajami), later Latin (Boko)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "West Africa's giant, spoken by some 80 million people across the Sahel. Hausa scholars wrote it in Arabic script for centuries before colonial Latin orthography arrived — part of a vast, often overlooked African manuscript tradition centred on cities like Kano and Timbuktu.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "guarani", "name": "Guaraní", "endonym": "Avañe'ẽ", "timeLabel": "Jesuit grammars from c. 1630s", "displayYear": "c. 1630s", "sortYear": 1630, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Paraguay & the Río de la Plata basin", "family": "Tupian", "branch": "Tupí–Guaraní", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The only Indigenous language of the Americas spoken by a majority non-Indigenous population: most Paraguayans speak Guaraní regardless of ancestry. Jesuit missionaries documented it richly in the 1600s, and it is now co-official with Spanish.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "kikongo", "name": "Kikongo", "endonym": "Kikongo", "timeLabel": "Catechism of 1624 — the first Bantu book", "displayYear": "1624", "sortYear": 1624, "region": "Africa", "place": "Kingdom of Kongo — Congo & Angola", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Bantu", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The first book printed in any Bantu language was a 1624 Kikongo catechism — product of the Kingdom of Kongo, a Christian African monarchy that exchanged ambassadors with the Vatican. Carried across the Atlantic by the enslaved, Kikongo words thread through Caribbean and Brazilian ritual speech.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "manx", "name": "Manx", "endonym": "Gaelg", "timeLabel": "Prayer book c. 1610; revived after 1974", "displayYear": "c. 1610", "sortYear": 1610, "region": "Europe", "place": "Isle of Man", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Goidelic)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "revived", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "When Ned Maddrell died in 1974, Manx became the textbook example of language death — UNESCO declared it extinct. The islanders objected, revived it from recordings and archives, and today a Manx-medium primary school raises children who correct the obituary daily.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "mapudungun", "name": "Mapudungun", "endonym": "Mapudungun — 'the speech of the land'", "timeLabel": "First grammar 1606", "displayYear": "1606", "sortYear": 1606, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Araucanía — Chile & Argentina", "family": "Araucanian", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Mapuche, who stopped the Inca at the Maule River and then held off Spain for three centuries — the only major Indigenous nation of the Americas never conquered by the conquistadors. A Jesuit grammar of 1606 opens its written record.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "kurdish", "name": "Kurdish", "endonym": "Kurdî / کوردی", "timeLabel": "Literature by the 16th–17th centuries", "displayYear": "c. 1600", "sortYear": 1600, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Kurdistan — Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Northwestern)", "script": "Latin (Kurmanji) & Perso-Arabic (Sorani)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Some 30 million speakers make Kurdish one of the largest languages without a state. Its classical monument is Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn (1692), a tragic romance the poet wrote — as he says outright — to prove Kurdish could do everything Persian and Arabic could.", "datingNote": "Claims of much earlier Kurdish poetry exist but rest on late manuscripts of uncertain date." }, { "id": "manchu", "name": "Manchu", "endonym": "ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ", "timeLabel": "Script adopted 1599", "displayYear": "1599", "sortYear": 1599, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Manchuria; imperial Beijing", "family": "Tungusic", "branch": null, "script": "Manchu script (vertical, from Mongolian)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of China's last dynasty: the Qing emperors ruled a quarter of humanity in Manchu, leaving millions of archive documents. Yet assimilation ran so deep that today fewer than twenty native speakers remain — an imperial language dying within living memory of its empire.", "datingNote": "The related Xibe language, spoken by descendants of Qing garrison troops in Xinjiang, survives with ~30,000 speakers as Manchu's living proxy." }, { "id": "latvian", "name": "Latvian", "endonym": "Latviešu valoda", "timeLabel": "First book 1585", "displayYear": "1585", "sortYear": 1585, "region": "Europe", "place": "Latvia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Baltic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Lithuanian's only surviving sibling — the second of just two living Baltic languages, the branch that preserves more Proto-Indo-European archaism than any other. Latvian innovated where Lithuanian conserved, which makes the pair a natural laboratory for historical linguists.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "aymara", "name": "Aymara", "endonym": "Aymar aru", "timeLabel": "Documented from the 1580s", "displayYear": "c. 1584", "sortYear": 1584, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Altiplano — Bolivia, Peru, Chile", "family": "Aymaran", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Quechua's high-plateau neighbour, spoken by two million people around Lake Titicaca. Aymara fascinates cognitive scientists for its grammar of time: evidence suggests its speakers picture the known past ahead of them and the unseen future behind — the reverse of nearly everyone else.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "pashto", "name": "Pashto", "endonym": "پښتو — Pax̌tó", "timeLabel": "Securely attested from the 16th century", "displayYear": "c. 1570", "sortYear": 1570, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Afghanistan & northwestern Pakistan", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern)", "script": "Perso-Arabic (extended)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Pashtuns and of the warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak, who fought the Mughals with sword and couplet alike. Some fifty million speakers, an unwritten code of honour — Pashtunwali — and a literature that begins in earnest with 16th-century mystics.", "datingNote": "The Pata Khazana, claiming 8th-century Pashto poetry, is widely considered a modern forgery — a famous cautionary tale in dating literatures." }, { "id": "quechua", "name": "Quechua", "endonym": "Runasimi — 'the people's tongue'", "timeLabel": "First grammar 1560", "displayYear": "1560", "sortYear": 1560, "region": "The Americas", "place": "The Andes — Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador", "family": "Quechuan", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet (khipu knot-records debated)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The administrative language of the Inca Empire, still spoken by 8–10 million Andeans — the largest Indigenous language family of the Americas. The Inca ran a continental empire without conventional writing, using khipu: knotted cords whose full meaning remains one of linguistics' great open questions.", "datingNote": "Whether khipu encoded true language or only numbers and categories is actively debated; if they did, Quechua's 'written' history would begin centuries earlier." }, { "id": "k-iche", "name": "K'iche'", "endonym": "K'iche' ch'ab'al", "timeLabel": "Popol Vuh written down c. 1554–1558", "displayYear": "c. 1554", "sortYear": 1554, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Guatemalan highlands", "family": "Mayan", "branch": "Quichean", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Keeper of the Popol Vuh — the Maya creation epic, secretly written out in Latin letters by K'iche' nobles a generation after the conquest: hero twins, ballgames with death, people fashioned from maize. A million speakers keep K'iche' the largest Mayan language today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "lithuanian", "name": "Lithuanian", "endonym": "Lietuvių kalba", "timeLabel": "First printed book 1547", "displayYear": "1547", "sortYear": 1547, "region": "Europe", "place": "Baltic — Lithuania", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Baltic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The most archaic living Indo-European language — some Lithuanian words and endings are so conservative they resemble Sanskrit forms spoken 3,000 years ago. Linguists famously joke that if you want to hear echoes of Proto-Indo-European, visit a Lithuanian village.", "datingNote": "Written late, but preserving very ancient structure: a perfect example of why 'first attested' says little about a language's age." }, { "id": "ladino-judeo-spanish", "name": "Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)", "endonym": "Djudeo-espanyol", "timeLabel": "Printed from 1547, after the 1492 expulsion", "displayYear": "1547", "sortYear": 1547, "region": "Europe", "place": "Sephardic diaspora — Istanbul, Salonika, Sarajevo", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Ibero-Romance)", "script": "Hebrew script, later Latin", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Spanish of 1492, carried into exile: when the Jews were expelled from Spain, they took the era's Castilian with them and preserved it for five centuries in Hebrew letters across the Ottoman world. Listening to Ladino is the nearest thing to hearing Columbus's contemporaries speak.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "nahuatl", "name": "Nahuatl", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Alphabetic texts from c. 1540s", "displayYear": "c. 1540s", "sortYear": 1545, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Central Mexico", "family": "Uto-Aztecan", "branch": "Nahuan", "script": "Latin alphabet; earlier Aztec pictorial glyphs", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Aztec Empire, source of 'chocolate', 'tomato', and 'coyote'. After the conquest, Nahua scribes produced an extraordinary alphabetic literature — histories, poetry, and the encyclopedic Florentine Codex. Around 1.5 million people still speak it.", "datingNote": "Pre-conquest Aztec writing was partly phonetic; how close it came to full writing is still being reassessed by scholars." }, { "id": "finnish", "name": "Finnish", "endonym": "Suomi", "timeLabel": "First books 1543", "displayYear": "1543", "sortYear": 1543, "region": "Europe", "place": "Finland", "family": "Uralic", "branch": "Finnic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Not Indo-European at all — Finnish belongs to the separate Uralic family, with fifteen grammatical cases and no grammatical gender. Mikael Agricola's 1543 primer founded written Finnish; the oral Kalevala poetry it later recorded is far more ancient.", "datingNote": "A birch-bark letter from c. 1240 (Novgorod letter 292) may be the oldest written Finnic text — its exact language is debated." }, { "id": "romani", "name": "Romani", "endonym": "Romani čhib", "timeLabel": "First recorded 1542; left India c. 1000 CE", "displayYear": "1542", "sortYear": 1542, "region": "Europe", "place": "Across Europe — origin in northwestern India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan", "script": "Latin & Cyrillic (recent)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "An Indian language hiding in the heart of Europe: Romani's grammar and core words betray a departure from India around 1000 CE, a migration written nowhere but in the language itself. Linguists traced the route — through Persia, Armenia, Byzantium — entirely from loanwords.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "purepecha", "name": "Purépecha", "endonym": "P'urhépecha", "timeLabel": "Documented from the 1540s–50s", "displayYear": "c. 1540", "sortYear": 1541, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Michoacán, Mexico", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The empire the Aztecs could not conquer spoke a language nobody can classify: Purépecha stands alone in Mesoamerica, unrelated to Nahuatl, Maya, or anything else. Its Tarascan state defeated every Aztec invasion; a friar's grammar of 1558 preserved its voice early and well.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "sindhi", "name": "Sindhi", "endonym": "سنڌي / सिन्धी", "timeLabel": "Literary tradition from c. the 16th century", "displayYear": "c. 1540", "sortYear": 1540, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Sindh, Pakistan", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan", "script": "Perso-Arabic (Sindhi variant)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Spoken beside the Indus where the undeciphered seals were made, Sindhi carries sounds almost no other language has — a full set of implosive consonants, swallowed inward. Its Sufi poetry, crowned by Shah Abdul Latif's Risalo, is sung nightly at shrines across Sindh.", "datingNote": "Fragments and travellers' reports hint at earlier written Sindhi, but the continuous tradition is securely traceable from the 16th century." }, { "id": "okinawan", "name": "Okinawan", "endonym": "うちなーぐち — Uchinaaguchi", "timeLabel": "Omoro Sōshi anthology, compiled from 1531", "displayYear": "1531", "sortYear": 1531, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands", "family": "Japonic", "branch": "Ryukyuan", "script": "Kanji & kana", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Japanese's sister, not its dialect: Okinawan and the other Ryukyuan languages split from Japanese over a millennium ago and are mutually unintelligible with it. The Omoro Sōshi preserves the sacred songs of the independent Ryukyu Kingdom, whose speech Japan later suppressed.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "plains-indian-sign-language", "name": "Plains Indian Sign Language", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Observed from the 1520s–30s", "displayYear": "c. 1530", "sortYear": 1530, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Great Plains of North America", "family": "Sign language", "branch": "Independent sign lingua franca", "script": "Signed — no script", "scriptGroup": "Signed", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "For centuries the nations of the Plains — speaking dozens of unrelated languages — negotiated, traded, and told stories in a shared signed lingua franca, already fluent when Spanish expeditions saw it in the 1520s. In 1930 a council of elder signers was filmed, preserving hours of it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "estonian", "name": "Estonian", "endonym": "Eesti keel", "timeLabel": "Kullamaa prayers, c. 1524–1528", "displayYear": "c. 1525", "sortYear": 1525, "region": "Europe", "place": "Estonia", "family": "Uralic", "branch": "Finnic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Finnish's southern cousin across the gulf, first caught on paper in hand-copied prayers of the 1520s. Estonian is famous among linguists for its three-way length contrast — vowels and consonants come short, long, and extra-long, a distinction few languages on Earth make.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "romanian", "name": "Romanian", "endonym": "Limba română", "timeLabel": "Earliest surviving letter 1521", "displayYear": "1521", "sortYear": 1521, "region": "Europe", "place": "Wallachia & Moldavia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Eastern)", "script": "Cyrillic, then Latin (19th c.)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The lost child of Latin in Eastern Europe: Roman soldiers' speech survived fifteen centuries surrounded by Slavic, Hungarian, and Turkish — yet left almost no written trace until Neacșu's letter of 1521, warning of an Ottoman invasion.", "datingNote": "The thousand-year documentary gap between Roman Dacia and 1521 makes early Romanian history one of the Romance family's great puzzles." }, { "id": "lao", "name": "Lao", "endonym": "ພາສາລາວ", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. the 15th–16th centuries", "displayYear": "c. 1500", "sortYear": 1500, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Laos & the Mekong valley", "family": "Kra–Dai", "branch": "Tai", "script": "Lao script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Thai's closest sibling, written in a rounder, sparer script shaped in the kingdom of Lan Xang — 'the land of a million elephants'. Counting the Isan region of Thailand, far more Lao speakers live outside Laos than in it: a border drawn straight through a language.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "taino", "name": "Taíno", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Recorded from 1492–1498", "displayYear": "c. 1494", "sortYear": 1494, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Caribbean — Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico", "family": "Arawakan", "branch": null, "script": "Recorded in Spanish accounts", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The first American language Europeans ever heard — and the first casualty. Before Taíno faded in the 1500s, it gave the world's languages canoe, hammock, hurricane, tobacco, barbecue, and iguana. Friar Ramón Pané's notes on Taíno belief (c. 1498) are the first ethnography of the Americas.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "yi-nuosu", "name": "Yi (Nuosu)", "endonym": "ꆈꌠꉙ", "timeLabel": "Classical Yi script attested by c. 1485 (earlier claims debated)", "displayYear": "c. 1485", "sortYear": 1485, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Yunnan & Sichuan, southwestern China", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": "Lolo-Burmese", "script": "Yi script (classical logographic; modern syllabary)", "scriptGroup": "Syllabaries", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Yi mountain peoples developed one of the world's few independently created logographic scripts, kept for centuries by bimo priests for ritual and genealogy. In 1974 China standardised it into a crisp 819-character syllabary — an ancient script re-engineered in living memory.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "maltese", "name": "Maltese", "endonym": "Malti", "timeLabel": "Il-Kantilena, c. 1470", "displayYear": "c. 1470", "sortYear": 1470, "region": "Europe", "place": "Malta", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — descended from Siculo-Arabic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The only Semitic language natively written in the Latin alphabet, and the only Semitic official language of the European Union. Descended from the Arabic of medieval Sicily, layered with Italian and English — a whole history of the Mediterranean in one language.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "albanian", "name": "Albanian", "endonym": "Shqip", "timeLabel": "First attested 1462", "displayYear": "1462", "sortYear": 1462, "region": "Europe", "place": "Western Balkans", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Albanian — its own branch", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "An entire branch of Indo-European hiding in plain sight: Albanian has no close relatives and only surfaced in writing in 1462, with a single baptismal formula. Its ancestry — perhaps ancient Illyrian — is one of Balkan linguistics' oldest debates.", "datingNote": "The Illyrian connection is plausible but unproven; almost nothing of Illyrian was ever written down to compare." }, { "id": "chagatai", "name": "Chagatai", "endonym": "چغتای — Čaḡatāy", "timeLabel": "Classical literature from the 15th century", "displayYear": "c. 1450", "sortYear": 1450, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Samarkand, Herat & the Timurid courts", "family": "Turkic", "branch": "Karluk", "script": "Perso-Arabic script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "classical", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The literary Turkic of Central Asia for five centuries — the language of Navoi's poetry and Babur's astonishingly frank memoirs. Chagatai served scribes from the Crimea to Kashgar until the 1920s, when Soviet planners replaced it with today's Uzbek and Uyghur standards.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "scots", "name": "Scots", "endonym": "Braid Scots", "timeLabel": "Barbour's Brus, 1375", "displayYear": "1375", "sortYear": 1375, "region": "Europe", "place": "Lowland Scotland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (West) — Anglic", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Not Gaelic and not quite English: Scots grew from northern Old English into the language of a royal court and of Robert Burns' 'Auld Lang Syne'. Whether it is a language or a dialect of English is the classic border dispute — census data says 1.5 million Scots still speak it either way.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "azerbaijani", "name": "Azerbaijani", "endonym": "Azərbaycan dili", "timeLabel": "Literature from the 14th century", "displayYear": "c. 1300s", "sortYear": 1370, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Azerbaijan & northwestern Iran", "family": "Turkic", "branch": "Oghuz", "script": "Latin, Cyrillic & Perso-Arabic — three scripts today", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The mystic poet Nasimi raised Azerbaijani to literary rank in the 14th century. The language since has lived through four script regimes — Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, Latin again — and is still written in Perso-Arabic by the majority of its speakers, who live in Iran.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "assamese", "name": "Assamese", "endonym": "অসমীয়া", "timeLabel": "Distinct literature by the 14th century", "displayYear": "c. 1350", "sortYear": 1352, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Assam, northeastern India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Eastern)", "script": "Bengali–Assamese script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The easternmost outpost of Indo-Aryan, carried up the Brahmaputra valley to the edge of Southeast Asia. Madhava Kandali's 14th-century Ramayana translation — among the first into any modern Indian language — marks its literary debut; it shares the Charyapada's older verses with Bengali and Odia.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "amharic", "name": "Amharic", "endonym": "አማርኛ — Amarəñña", "timeLabel": "Royal songs, 14th century", "displayYear": "c. 1300s", "sortYear": 1350, "region": "Africa", "place": "Ethiopian Highlands", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Ethiopic", "script": "Geʽez script (fidäl)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the Ethiopian imperial court from the Middle Ages onward, first glimpsed in 14th-century songs praising the emperor. Now spoken by over 30 million people, written in the beautiful syllable-based fidäl inherited from Geʽez.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "belarusian", "name": "Belarusian", "endonym": "Беларуская мова", "timeLabel": "Ruthenian chancery texts from the 14th century", "displayYear": "c. 1300s", "sortYear": 1350, "region": "Europe", "place": "Belarus & the Grand Duchy of Lithuania", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (East)", "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Old Belarusian — Ruthenian — was once the official chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, one of medieval Europe's largest states. Today, after centuries of russification, most Belarusians speak Russian daily; UNESCO lists Belarusian as vulnerable in its own country.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "mixtec", "name": "Mixtec", "endonym": "Tu'un Sávi — 'the rain speech'", "timeLabel": "Painted codices, c. 14th–16th centuries", "displayYear": "c. 1350", "sortYear": 1348, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Oaxaca, Mexico", "family": "Oto-Manguean", "branch": "Mixtecan", "script": "Pictorial codices; Latin alphabet today", "scriptGroup": "Hieroglyphs", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Mixtec codices — deerskin books that fold like screens — narrate royal sagas like that of Eight Deer Jaguar Claw, an 11th-century conqueror whose biography we can still read in pictures. Half a million people speak Mixtec languages today, in Oaxaca and in diaspora California.", "datingNote": "How far the pictorial system encoded language sounds, versus telling stories in pure imagery, is still debated — the boundary of 'writing' itself." }, { "id": "kashmiri", "name": "Kashmiri", "endonym": "कॉशुर / كأشُر — Koshur", "timeLabel": "Verse from c. the 13th–14th centuries", "displayYear": "c. 1300s", "sortYear": 1320, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Kashmir Valley", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Dardic)", "script": "Perso-Arabic (also Sharada, Devanagari)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "oral", "blurb": "Kashmiri literature begins with a woman's voice: the vakhs of the mystic poetess Lal Ded, composed in the 14th century and carried orally for generations before writing caught up. The language preserves archaic Dardic features lost across the rest of the Indo-Aryan plains.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "old-prussian", "name": "Old Prussian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Basel epigram c. 1369; vocabulary c. 1300", "displayYear": "c. 1300s", "sortYear": 1300, "region": "Europe", "place": "Prussia — Baltic coast of Poland & Russia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Baltic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The oldest recorded Baltic text is a two-line drinking joke a student scribbled in a manuscript around 1369 — in Old Prussian, the language that gave Prussia its name before German settlers absorbed its speakers. It died around 1700, surviving in three catechisms and two wordlists.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "thai", "name": "Thai", "endonym": "ภาษาไทย — Phasa Thai", "timeLabel": "Ram Khamhaeng stele, dated 1292", "displayYear": "1292", "sortYear": 1292, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Sukhothai Kingdom, Thailand", "family": "Kra–Dai", "branch": "Tai", "script": "Thai script (Brahmi-derived, via Khmer)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Ram Khamhaeng inscription proudly announces the invention of Thai writing — 'this script did not exist before'. It anchors Thai history, though Tai-speaking peoples had been migrating south from what is now southern China for centuries beforehand.", "datingNote": "The stele's authenticity has been seriously questioned — some scholars suspect a 19th-century creation. Most accept it as genuine, but the debate is a classic of epigraphy." }, { "id": "hindi-urdu-hindustani", "name": "Hindi–Urdu (Hindustani)", "endonym": "हिन्दी / اردو", "timeLabel": "Early literature by c. 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 1200s", "sortYear": 1280, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Delhi & the Gangetic plain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan", "script": "Devanagari (Hindi) & Perso-Arabic (Urdu)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "One spoken language wearing two scripts and two names — together the third-most-spoken language on Earth. It crystallised around Delhi as Persian-speaking courts met local Indo-Aryan speech; the poet Amir Khusrau was already playing with it in the 13th century.", "datingNote": "There is no single 'birth date': Hindustani condensed gradually out of Apabhraṃśa dialects between roughly the 10th and 13th centuries." }, { "id": "yiddish", "name": "Yiddish", "endonym": "ייִדיש", "timeLabel": "Earliest dated sentence, 1272", "displayYear": "1272", "sortYear": 1272, "region": "Europe", "place": "Rhineland, then Eastern Europe", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (with Hebrew & Slavic strata)", "script": "Hebrew script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A Germanic language written in Hebrew letters, born in the medieval Rhineland and carried across Eastern Europe. Its first dated sentence is a blessing hidden inside an ornate letter of the Worms Maḥzor. Once spoken by 11+ million; the Holocaust destroyed most of that world.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "polish", "name": "Polish", "endonym": "Język polski", "timeLabel": "First recorded sentence, c. 1270", "displayYear": "c. 1270", "sortYear": 1270, "region": "Europe", "place": "Silesia, Poland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The first written Polish sentence, preserved in a monastery chronicle, is disarmingly domestic: 'Let me grind, and you rest' — a husband offering to take over the milling. Proof that when languages finally enter writing, they arrive mid-conversation.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "turkish", "name": "Turkish", "endonym": "Türkçe", "timeLabel": "Anatolian Turkish literature from the 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 1270s", "sortYear": 1270, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Anatolia, Turkey", "family": "Turkic", "branch": "Oghuz", "script": "Latin since 1928; Ottoman Arabic before", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The poems of Yunus Emre carried Anatolian Turkish into literature in the 13th century; the Ottoman Empire carried it to three continents. In 1928 Atatürk switched the entire nation from Arabic to Latin script in months — history's most sweeping overnight writing reform.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "nepali", "name": "Nepali", "endonym": "नेपाली", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. the 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 1250", "sortYear": 1255, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Nepal & the Himalayan foothills", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Northern)", "script": "Devanagari", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The lingua franca of the Himalaya, spread by the Gorkha conquests that unified Nepal in the 18th century. It now bridges a country where over a hundred languages — Indo-Aryan, Sino-Tibetan, and isolates like Kusunda — share the world's steepest terrain.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tigrinya", "name": "Tigrinya", "endonym": "ትግርኛ", "timeLabel": "Attested by c. the 13th century (dating debated)", "displayYear": "c. 1250", "sortYear": 1252, "region": "Africa", "place": "Eritrea & Tigray, Ethiopia", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Ethiopic", "script": "Geʽez script", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Geʽez's most vigorous heir, spoken by some nine million people across Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. A customary law text from Logo Sarda, possibly 13th-century, may be its oldest writing — vernacular law recorded centuries before vernacular literature became routine.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "vietnamese", "name": "Vietnamese", "endonym": "Tiếng Việt", "timeLabel": "Chữ Nôm texts by c. 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 1200s", "sortYear": 1250, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Red River Delta, Vietnam", "family": "Austroasiatic", "branch": "Vietic", "script": "Chữ Nôm (Chinese-derived), later Latin (quốc ngữ)", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "After a millennium of Chinese rule, Vietnamese scholars bent Chinese characters into chữ Nôm to write their own language — then, uniquely in Asia, swapped the entire system for a Latin alphabet devised by 17th-century missionaries. The most-spoken Austroasiatic language by far.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "frisian", "name": "Frisian", "endonym": "Frysk", "timeLabel": "Law codes from c. 1200s; runic finds centuries earlier", "displayYear": "c. 1250", "sortYear": 1250, "region": "Europe", "place": "Friesland — Netherlands & German coast", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (West) — Anglo-Frisian", "script": "Latin alphabet (earlier runes)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "English's closest living relative — the old rhyme runs 'bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries'. Old Frisian law codes preserve a North Sea legal world of wergild and dike-duty; today around 450,000 West Frisians keep the family line alive.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "swedish", "name": "Swedish", "endonym": "Svenska", "timeLabel": "Law manuscripts from c. 1225; runes long before", "displayYear": "c. 1225", "sortYear": 1225, "region": "Europe", "place": "Sweden", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Latin alphabet (earlier runes)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Westrogothic Law (c. 1225) is Sweden's first book, but Swedish writing is older on stone: the country holds more runestones than anywhere on Earth, including the enigmatic 9th-century Rök stone — 760 runes of heroic allusion that scholars still argue over line by line.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "mongolian", "name": "Mongolian", "endonym": "Монгол хэл — ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ", "timeLabel": "Stele of Yisüngge, c. 1224", "displayYear": "c. 1224", "sortYear": 1224, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Mongolia", "family": "Mongolic", "branch": null, "script": "Traditional vertical script & Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Mongolian writing begins with an athletic boast: a stone recording that Genghis Khan's nephew Yisüngge shot an arrow 335 fathoms. The Secret History of the Mongols followed — the dynasty's inside story — in a vertical script borrowed from the Uyghurs and still official in Inner Mongolia today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "czech", "name": "Czech", "endonym": "Čeština", "timeLabel": "Sentences from the 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 1200s", "sortYear": 1220, "region": "Europe", "place": "Bohemia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet (with háček diacritics)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Czech names appear in Latin charters from the 11th century and full sentences by the 13th. The háček diacritics that give Czech its bristling look — š, č, ř — were proposed in a spelling reform attributed to the reformer Jan Hus, and later spread to dozens of languages.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "danish", "name": "Danish", "endonym": "Dansk", "timeLabel": "Law codes from c. 1200s; runic Danish centuries earlier", "displayYear": "c. 1200", "sortYear": 1200, "region": "Europe", "place": "Denmark", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Latin alphabet (earlier runes)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Medieval Danish opens with provincial law codes — 'with law shall the land be built', begins the Law of Jutland (1241). Danish went on to shed so many sounds that its famously swallowed pronunciation is studied as a natural experiment in how much erosion a language can survive.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "punjabi", "name": "Punjabi", "endonym": "ਪੰਜਾਬੀ / پنجابی", "timeLabel": "Poetry attributed to the 12th–13th centuries", "displayYear": "c. 1200", "sortYear": 1200, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Punjab — India & Pakistan", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan", "script": "Gurmukhi & Shahmukhi (Perso-Arabic)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Over a hundred million speakers and, unusually, a tone system — rare in Indo-European. Punjabi's literary tradition opens with the Sufi verses of Baba Farid, later enshrined in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture that made Gurmukhi one of the world's sacred scripts.", "datingNote": "Baba Farid's 12th–13th-century verses survive via the Guru Granth Sahib, compiled 1604 — the usual gap between composition and manuscript." }, { "id": "dhivehi", "name": "Dhivehi", "endonym": "ދިވެހި", "timeLabel": "Copper-plate grants from 1194", "displayYear": "1194", "sortYear": 1194, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Maldives", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Insular)", "script": "Thaana (earlier Dhives Akuru)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Sinhala's ocean-going sibling, isolated across the Maldive atolls. Its Thaana script is a one-off: written right to left, its letters built from Arabic numerals and older Maldivian digits — possibly designed so sacred formulas could be embedded in it, number-magic turned alphabet.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "portuguese", "name": "Portuguese", "endonym": "Português", "timeLabel": "Documents by c. 1175–1214", "displayYear": "c. 1200", "sortYear": 1190, "region": "Europe", "place": "Galicia & the County of Portugal, Iberia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Galician–Portuguese)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Born as Galician–Portuguese on Iberia's Atlantic edge — the language of medieval troubadour song — and first glimpsed in legal scraps like the Notícia de Torto, a jagged complaint about an ambush. Carried by caravels, it is now the most-spoken language of the Southern Hemisphere.", "datingNote": "Which scrap counts as 'first Portuguese' is debated: 12th-century documents mix Latin and Romance so thoroughly that drawing the line is partly a matter of definition." }, { "id": "gujarati", "name": "Gujarati", "endonym": "ગુજરાતી", "timeLabel": "Old Gujarati texts from c. 1185", "displayYear": "c. 1185", "sortYear": 1185, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Gujarat, western India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan", "script": "Gujarati script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The merchant language of India's western seaboard, first written in Jain verse romances of the 12th century. Gujarati ledgers followed trade routes to Africa and beyond; centuries later it was the mother tongue of both Gandhi and Jinnah — the founders of two rival nations.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-mongolic", "name": "Proto-Mongolic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 12th century CE", "displayYear": "c. 1150", "sortYear": 1150, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Mongolian plateau", "family": "Mongolic", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "A proto-language young enough to have a face: Mongolic's common ancestor was spoken around the era of Genghis Khan himself, whose conquests scattered it from Afghanistan to Manchuria. Its shallow age shows how empires can reset a family's clock — all earlier Mongolic diversity was absorbed.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "scottish-gaelic", "name": "Scottish Gaelic", "endonym": "Gàidhlig", "timeLabel": "Notes in the Book of Deer, c. 1100s", "displayYear": "c. 1130", "sortYear": 1130, "region": "Europe", "place": "Scottish Highlands & Islands", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Goidelic)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Gaelic monks jotting property records into the margins of the Book of Deer left the earliest written Scottish Gaelic — and a snapshot of a language that once reached from the Hebrides to the royal court. Today some 57,000 speakers and Gaelic-medium schools hold the line.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "icelandic", "name": "Icelandic", "endonym": "Íslenska", "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 1120s", "displayYear": "c. 1122", "sortYear": 1125, "region": "Europe", "place": "Iceland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The deep-freeze of Germanic: isolated in the North Atlantic, Icelandic has changed so little since the sagas that schoolchildren read 800-year-old manuscripts with modest effort. Its policy of coining native words — tölva, 'number-prophetess', for computer — keeps the freeze going.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "burmese", "name": "Burmese", "endonym": "မြန်မာဘာသာ", "timeLabel": "Myazedi inscription, 1113", "displayYear": "1113", "sortYear": 1113, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Bagan, Myanmar", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": "Lolo-Burmese", "script": "Burmese script (Brahmi-derived, via Mon)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The four-sided Myazedi pillar tells the same royal story in Burmese, Pali, Mon, and Pyu — a Rosetta Stone of medieval Southeast Asia, and the first dated appearance of Burmese, written in the round letters shaped by scribes writing on palm leaves.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "serbo-croatian-bcms", "name": "Serbo-Croatian (BCMS)", "endonym": "Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски", "timeLabel": "Attested by c. 1100", "displayYear": "c. 1100", "sortYear": 1100, "region": "Europe", "place": "Western Balkans", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (South)", "script": "Latin, Cyrillic, and historically Glagolitic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "One language with four names — Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian — and a millennium of writing in three alphabets, opening with the Glagolitic Baška tablet (c. 1100) and the ornate Miroslav Gospel (c. 1186). A living lesson in how politics, not grammar, draws language borders.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "cornish", "name": "Cornish", "endonym": "Kernewek", "timeLabel": "Glossary c. 1100; revived from c. 1904", "displayYear": "c. 1100", "sortYear": 1095, "region": "Europe", "place": "Cornwall, Britain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Brittonic)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "revived", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Cornish faded in the 18th century — tradition names the fishwife Dolly Pentreath (d. 1777) as its last fluent speaker — then returned: a 20th-century revival rebuilt it from medieval mystery plays and glossaries, and a few hundred families now raise children in it again.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "catalan", "name": "Catalan", "endonym": "Català", "timeLabel": "Feudal complaints, c. 1080–1095", "displayYear": "c. 1090", "sortYear": 1090, "region": "Europe", "place": "Catalonia & the western Mediterranean", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Occitano-Romance)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "First glimpsed in an aggrieved feudal memorandum — a vassal itemising his lord's abuses around 1090 — Catalan grew into the language of a Mediterranean merchant empire and of medieval bestsellers like Tirant lo Blanch. Nine million speakers make it Europe's largest 'stateless' language.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "sardinian", "name": "Sardinian", "endonym": "Sardu", "timeLabel": "Charters from c. 1080s", "displayYear": "c. 1080", "sortYear": 1085, "region": "Europe", "place": "Sardinia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The closest living echo of Latin: isolated mid-sea, Sardinian kept the hard Latin k — its 'kentu' preserves what every other Romance language softened into 'cento' or 'ciento'. Its medieval charters are among the earliest Romance legal documents anywhere.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "dutch", "name": "Dutch", "endonym": "Nederlands", "timeLabel": "Attested by c. 1100 (older fragments debated)", "displayYear": "c. 1100", "sortYear": 1080, "region": "Europe", "place": "Low Countries", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Famously first attested — so the story goes — in a scrap of love poetry a Flemish monk scribbled to test his pen: 'All the birds have begun nests, except me and you.' Older psalm fragments exist, but none so charming.", "datingNote": "The Wachtendonck Psalms (c. 10th century) and the runic Bergakker find (c. 425 CE) may be earlier Dutch ancestors; scholars disagree on where 'Frankish' ends and 'Dutch' begins." }, { "id": "bulgarian", "name": "Bulgarian", "endonym": "Български език", "timeLabel": "Distinct features in manuscripts by c. 1100s", "displayYear": "c. 1100", "sortYear": 1080, "region": "Europe", "place": "Bulgaria", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (South)", "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Bulgarian has a special claim: Old Church Slavonic itself was codified from the Slavic dialects around Thessalonica and refined in Bulgarian court schools — where the Cyrillic alphabet was created. Later Bulgarian did something rare for Slavic: it dropped its cases and grew articles, Balkan-style.", "datingNote": "Where 'Old Church Slavonic' ends and 'Old Bulgarian' begins is partly a naming dispute; Bulgarian scholarship treats them as one." }, { "id": "hungarian", "name": "Hungarian", "endonym": "Magyar", "timeLabel": "Fragments from 1055", "displayYear": "1055", "sortYear": 1055, "region": "Europe", "place": "Carpathian Basin, Hungary", "family": "Uralic", "branch": "Ugric", "script": "Latin alphabet (earlier rovás runes, sparse)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A Uralic island in an Indo-European sea: Hungarian's closest relatives live thousands of kilometres away in Siberia. Magyar words first surface embedded in the Latin charter of Tihany Abbey in 1055; the oldest complete text is a haunting funeral sermon from c. 1192.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "mozarabic", "name": "Mozarabic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Kharja verses, 11th century", "displayYear": "c. 1050", "sortYear": 1050, "region": "Europe", "place": "al-Andalus — Islamic Spain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Ibero-Romance)", "script": "Arabic & Hebrew letters (aljamiado)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Romance speech of Christians and Jews under Islamic rule in Spain, preserved almost by accident: poets in Arabic and Hebrew ended their formal verses with kharjas — snatches of popular song in Mozarabic, often in a girl's voice. Some of the earliest Romance lyrics are these borrowed refrains.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "odia", "name": "Odia", "endonym": "ଓଡ଼ିଆ", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. the 11th century", "displayYear": "c. 1050", "sortYear": 1050, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Odisha, eastern India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Eastern)", "script": "Odia script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "One of India's six officially 'classical' languages, with temple inscriptions nearly a millennium old. The Odia script's distinctive round letters have a practical origin: straight lines split palm leaves along the grain, so scribes learned to curve everything.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tangut", "name": "Tangut", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Script promulgated 1036", "displayYear": "1036", "sortYear": 1036, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Western Xia Empire — northwestern China", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": "Qiangic", "script": "Tangut script — ~6,000 characters", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "By imperial decree of 1036, the Tangut state created six thousand characters denser than Chinese — possibly the most visually complex script ever used. Genghis Khan annihilated the empire, but a dead city's buried library, found in 1909, let scholars resurrect the whole language.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "russian", "name": "Russian", "endonym": "Русский язык (from Old East Slavic)", "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 1000s", "displayYear": "c. 1000s", "sortYear": 1030, "region": "Europe", "place": "Kievan Rus' — Novgorod, Kyiv", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (East)", "script": "Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Old East Slavic — ancestor of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian — survives not just in gospels but in hundreds of birch-bark letters dug from Novgorod's mud: shopping lists, love notes, even a boy's doodles. Ordinary medieval voices, preserved by accident.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "ossetian", "name": "Ossetian", "endonym": "Ирон ӕвзаг — Iron ævzag", "timeLabel": "Zelenchuk inscription, c. 10th–12th century", "displayYear": "c. 1000s", "sortYear": 1010, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "North & South Ossetia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern) — Alanic", "script": "Cyrillic (Greek letters medievally)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The last voice of the steppe horsemen: Ossetian descends from Alanic, the language of the Alans, and beyond them the Scythians and Sarmatians of ancient fame. A single medieval gravestone in Greek letters, and half a million speakers today, are all that remain of that world.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "occitan", "name": "Occitan", "endonym": "Occitan / Lenga d'òc", "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 1000; troubadour lyric from c. 1100", "displayYear": "c. 1000", "sortYear": 1005, "region": "Europe", "place": "Southern France", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Occitano-Romance)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of the troubadours, who invented the European love lyric and taught Dante his craft — he seriously considered writing the Divine Comedy in it. Eight centuries of French centralisation later, the speech of half of France survives mostly in villages and revival schools.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "zhuang", "name": "Zhuang", "endonym": "Vahcuengh", "timeLabel": "Sawndip manuscripts — in use for a millennium (dating debated)", "displayYear": "c. 1000s", "sortYear": 1002, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Guangxi, southern China", "family": "Kra–Dai", "branch": "Tai", "script": "Sawndip (Chinese-style characters); Latin official", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "China's largest minority language — some sixteen million speakers — and Thai's northern cousin, marking the family's homeland before the great Tai migrations south. Zhuang scribes built their own character script, sawndip ('raw characters'), on the Chinese model.", "datingNote": "Sawndip's age is genuinely uncertain: estimates run from the Tang dynasty to the Song; the tradition was never standardised." }, { "id": "marathi", "name": "Marathi", "endonym": "मराठी", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. 1000", "displayYear": "c. 1000", "sortYear": 1000, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Deccan plateau, India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Southern)", "script": "Devanagari (earlier Modi script)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "One of the first modern Indian vernaculars to leave Sanskrit's shadow in stone, appearing in temple inscriptions around the turn of the millennium. Its later devotional poetry — Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram — became the heartbeat of western India.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "slovene", "name": "Slovene", "endonym": "Slovenščina", "timeLabel": "Freising manuscripts, c. 972–1039", "displayYear": "c. 1000", "sortYear": 1000, "region": "Europe", "place": "Slovenia & Alpine Slavic lands", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (South)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Freising manuscripts — confession formulas copied around the year 1000 — are the oldest surviving Slavic text in the Latin alphabet, and Slovene's birth certificate. The modern language keeps a rarity almost every European language has lost: the dual number, special grammar for exactly two.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "spanish", "name": "Spanish", "endonym": "Español / Castellano", "timeLabel": "Glosses, c. 950–1050", "displayYear": "c. 1000", "sortYear": 980, "region": "Europe", "place": "Iberia — Castile & La Rioja", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Ibero-Romance)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Spanish begins in the margins: monks annotating Latin sermons in the everyday Romance they actually spoke. From those scribbled glosses grew the world's second-largest native language, carried across an ocean five centuries later.", "datingNote": "Whether the famous Glosas Emilianenses are early Spanish or neighbouring Navarro-Aragonese is debated; the Valpuesta cartularies (c. 900s) are an older rival claim." }, { "id": "italian", "name": "Italian", "endonym": "Italiano", "timeLabel": "Placiti Cassinesi, 960", "displayYear": "960", "sortYear": 960, "region": "Europe", "place": "Southern Italy — Capua", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Italo-Romance)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Italian's birth certificate is a courtroom oath from 960 CE about monastery land boundaries — the first time an Italian scribe wrote the people's speech instead of Latin. Dante would forge it into a literary language three centuries later.", "datingNote": "The Veronese Riddle (c. 800) may be older, but scholars argue over whether it is late Latin or early Italian — the boundary is genuinely blurry." }, { "id": "bengali", "name": "Bengali", "endonym": "বাংলা — Bangla", "timeLabel": "Charyapada songs, c. 8th–12th century", "displayYear": "c. 950", "sortYear": 950, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Bengal — Bangladesh & West Bengal, India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Eastern)", "script": "Bengali–Assamese script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Now the fifth-most-spoken language on Earth and the tongue of Tagore's Nobel-winning poetry, Bengali first shimmers into view in the Charyapada — mystical Buddhist songs whose 'twilight language' was designed to be half-understood.", "datingNote": "The Charyapada's dating spans centuries, and Assamese and Odia claim the same corpus as their own ancestor — all three are right, since the languages had not yet separated." }, { "id": "khitan", "name": "Khitan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Two scripts created, 920s", "displayYear": "c. 920s", "sortYear": 920, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Liao Empire — Manchuria & Mongolia", "family": "Mongolic (para-Mongolic)", "branch": null, "script": "Khitan large & small scripts", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Khitan — whose name survives in 'Cathay' — ruled northern China and commissioned not one but two scripts in the 920s. Both are only partially deciphered; their memorial stones for emperors and princesses are still surrendering their grammar one funeral at a time.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tagalog", "name": "Tagalog", "endonym": "Wikang Tagalog", "timeLabel": "Laguna Copperplate, 900", "displayYear": "900", "sortYear": 900, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Manila Bay region, Philippines", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Malayo-Polynesian", "script": "Kawi, later Baybayin, now Latin", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "A copperplate from 900 CE cancelling a nobleman's debt is the Philippines' oldest written document — evidence that the islands were plugged into Indian-influenced maritime Asia long before Spain arrived. Tagalog is the base of Filipino, spoken by 100+ million.", "datingNote": "The inscription's language is mostly Old Malay with Old Tagalog and Javanese elements — a snapshot of a multilingual trading world rather than pure Tagalog." }, { "id": "balinese", "name": "Balinese", "endonym": "ᬩᬲᬩᬮᬶ — Basa Bali", "timeLabel": "Royal edicts from 882", "displayYear": "882", "sortYear": 882, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Bali, Indonesia", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Malayo-Polynesian", "script": "Balinese script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Old Balinese royal edicts predate even the great Javanese courts' influence on the island. The language survives today layered like Javanese — different vocabularies for priests, nobles, and neighbours — and its curling script still adorns temple texts on the last Hindu island of Indonesia.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "old-church-slavonic", "name": "Old Church Slavonic", "endonym": "Словѣньскъ ѩзыкъ", "timeLabel": "Mission of Cyril & Methodius, 863; oldest manuscripts 10th century", "displayYear": "863", "sortYear": 863, "region": "Europe", "place": "Great Moravia & the First Bulgarian Empire", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic (South)", "script": "Glagolitic, then Cyrillic", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The first written Slavic language: the brother-monks Cyril and Methodius devised the Glagolitic alphabet in 863 to bring Christian liturgy to the Slavs in their own speech. Their students' refinement — Cyrillic — now writes over 250 million people's languages, and Church Slavonic still sounds in Orthodox services from Belgrade to Vladivostok.", "datingNote": "The 863 date marks the mission; the oldest surviving manuscripts are 10th–11th century copies, and the earliest of all is debated." }, { "id": "new-persian", "name": "New Persian", "endonym": "فارسی — Fārsi", "timeLabel": "Literary rise, 9th century", "displayYear": "c. 850", "sortYear": 850, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Greater Iran & Central Asia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian", "script": "Perso-Arabic script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Persian is the phoenix of languages: documented as Old Persian under Darius (6th c. BCE), as Middle Persian under the Sasanians, and reborn in Arabic script after Islam — one of the longest continuous recorded lifespans of any living language, crowned by Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "french", "name": "French", "endonym": "Français", "timeLabel": "Oaths of Strasbourg, 842", "displayYear": "842", "sortYear": 842, "region": "Europe", "place": "Strasbourg — the Carolingian Empire", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Romance (Gallo-Romance)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "French enters history as a military necessity: in 842, two grandsons of Charlemagne swore alliance aloud in the Romance vernacular so that each other's soldiers — who no longer understood Latin — could witness it. From that battlefield oath descends the language of Molière, diplomacy, and some 300 million speakers.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "malayalam", "name": "Malayalam", "endonym": "മലയാളം", "timeLabel": "Copper plates, c. 830–849", "displayYear": "c. 830", "sortYear": 840, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Kerala, India", "family": "Dravidian", "branch": "South Dravidian", "script": "Malayalam script (via Grantha)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The youngest of the four great Dravidian literary languages, Malayalam separated gradually from Old Tamil behind Kerala's mountain wall. Its first royal copper plates appear in the 9th century; it went on to build one of India's richest literary cultures.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "breton", "name": "Breton", "endonym": "Brezhoneg", "timeLabel": "Old Breton glosses from c. 800", "displayYear": "c. 800s", "sortYear": 830, "region": "Europe", "place": "Brittany, France", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Brittonic)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Celtic that crossed the sea backwards: Breton descends from British refugees who fled to Armorica as the Anglo-Saxons advanced — making it a Brittonic language of the Continent. Once a million strong, its speakers now number around 200,000, most of them elderly.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "javanese", "name": "Javanese", "endonym": "ꦧꦱꦗꦮ — Basa Jawa", "timeLabel": "Sukabumi inscription, 804", "displayYear": "804", "sortYear": 804, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Java, Indonesia", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Malayo-Polynesian", "script": "Kawi, later Javanese script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The language of Borobudur's builders and the shadow-puppet epics, with one of the world's great pre-modern literatures. Javanese famously operates in layered speech levels — entire parallel vocabularies chosen by the social rank of who you address. Still ~80 million speakers.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "welsh", "name": "Welsh", "endonym": "Cymraeg", "timeLabel": "Old Welsh by c. 800s", "displayYear": "c. 800s", "sortYear": 800, "region": "Europe", "place": "Wales, Britain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Brittonic)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Heir of the Brittonic speech that covered Britain before English existed there. The elegiac poetry attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin may reach back to the 6th century — making Welsh verse arguably the oldest continuous poetic tradition of any living European vernacular.", "datingNote": "Memorial stones and poem origins from the 6th–7th centuries are debated; secure Old Welsh writing begins around the 9th century." }, { "id": "old-nubian", "name": "Old Nubian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Documents from c. 790s", "displayYear": "c. 795", "sortYear": 795, "region": "Africa", "place": "Nubia — the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum", "family": "Nilo-Saharan (proposed)", "branch": "Northern East Sudanic — Nubian", "script": "Coptic-derived alphabet with Meroitic letters", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of Christian Nubia, written in a Greek-Coptic alphabet spiced with letters salvaged from ancient Meroitic. One of the oldest written languages of sub-Saharan Africa, it lives on in its descendant Nobiin, still spoken along the Nile today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "german", "name": "German", "endonym": "Deutsch (from Old High German)", "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 765", "displayYear": "c. 765", "sortYear": 765, "region": "Europe", "place": "Frankish monasteries — Fulda, St. Gallen", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (West)", "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Written German begins with a dictionary — the Abrogans, a Latin–German glossary from c. 765 — followed by the Hildebrandslied, a fragmentary heroic poem of a father forced to duel his own son. From these seeds grew the language of Luther, Goethe, and 100 million speakers.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tibetan", "name": "Tibetan", "endonym": "བོད་སྐད — Bod skad", "timeLabel": "Imperial inscriptions, c. 760s", "displayYear": "c. 760s", "sortYear": 760, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Tibetan Plateau", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": "Tibetic", "script": "Tibetan script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Created by imperial decree to translate Buddhist scripture, the Tibetan script froze 8th-century pronunciation in amber — modern spelling still records consonants that vanished from speech a thousand years ago, making written Tibetan a time capsule for linguists.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "old-norse", "name": "Old Norse", "endonym": "Dǫnsk tunga", "timeLabel": "From c. 750; sagas written 13th century", "displayYear": "c. 750", "sortYear": 750, "region": "Europe", "place": "Scandinavia & the Viking diaspora", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Younger Futhark runes, later Latin", "scriptGroup": "Runes & Ogham", "status": "classical", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The tongue of the Vikings, scratched in runes from Greenland to Istanbul, then poured into the Icelandic sagas and Eddas — medieval Europe's most extraordinary vernacular literature. Icelandic has changed so little that schoolchildren can still read 800-year-old sagas.", "datingNote": "Eddic poems were composed orally, possibly centuries before the 13th-century manuscripts that preserve them — their true age is unknowable." }, { "id": "old-turkic", "name": "Old Turkic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Orkhon inscriptions, c. 730s", "displayYear": "c. 730s", "sortYear": 730, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Orkhon Valley, Mongolia", "family": "Turkic", "branch": "Siberian/Common Turkic", "script": "Old Turkic runiform ('Turkic runes')", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "On stone stelae in the Mongolian steppe, Turkic khagans carved the first written monuments of any Turkic language — imperial autobiography, lament, and political advice. Their descendants, from Turkish to Uzbek to Yakut, are spoken today from the Balkans to the Arctic.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "japanese", "name": "Japanese", "endonym": "日本語 — Nihongo", "timeLabel": "Texts from 712; fragments earlier", "displayYear": "712", "sortYear": 712, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Nara, Japan", "family": "Japonic", "branch": null, "script": "Kanji with kana syllabaries", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Old Japanese arrives fully formed in the Kojiki (712) and the Man'yōshū — 4,500 poems capturing eighth-century voices from emperors to border guards. Japanese ingeniously bent Chinese characters to a totally unrelated grammar, eventually distilling them into the kana syllabaries.", "datingNote": "Names on 5th-century sword inscriptions and 7th-century wooden tablets (mokkan) push written traces earlier, but connected texts begin in the 8th century." }, { "id": "english", "name": "English", "endonym": "Ænglisc (Old English)", "timeLabel": "Attested by c. 700", "displayYear": "c. 700", "sortYear": 700, "region": "Europe", "place": "Anglo-Saxon Britain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (West)", "script": "Runes (futhorc), then Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Today's global lingua franca began as the speech of a few hundred thousand farmers on a rainy island. Cædmon's Hymn — sung, tradition says, by an illiterate cowherd — and epic Beowulf open a documented history that runs unbroken to the words you are reading now.", "datingNote": "Short runic inscriptions from the 5th–6th centuries may be earlier English, but their readings are debated; continuous texts begin around 700." }, { "id": "korean", "name": "Korean", "endonym": "한국어 — Hangugeo", "timeLabel": "Old Korean poems, c. 7th century; Hangul 1443", "displayYear": "c. 600s", "sortYear": 690, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Silla Kingdom, Korean Peninsula", "family": "Koreanic", "branch": null, "script": "Chinese characters (idu), then Hangul (1443)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Korean struggled for centuries inside borrowed Chinese characters until King Sejong unveiled Hangul in 1443 — an alphabet designed from scratch on phonetic principles, its letters shaped like the mouth making each sound. Linguists routinely call it the most scientific script ever created.", "datingNote": "Old Korean survives only in fragments — hyangga poems recorded with Chinese characters — so early Korean pronunciation involves substantial reconstruction." }, { "id": "malay", "name": "Malay", "endonym": "Bahasa Melayu / Indonesia", "timeLabel": "Kedukan Bukit inscription, 683", "displayYear": "683", "sortYear": 683, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Srivijaya — Sumatra, Indonesia", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Malayo-Polynesian", "script": "Pallava, later Jawi (Arabic), now Latin", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Old Malay was the trade language of the Srivijaya maritime empire, and it never stopped being one: a thousand years later it was chosen as Indonesia's unifying national language. Some 280 million people now speak Malay–Indonesian — the great success story of Austronesian.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tocharian", "name": "Tocharian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Manuscripts c. 500–800", "displayYear": "c. 650", "sortYear": 650, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Tarim Basin oasis cities, Xinjiang", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Tocharian — its own branch", "script": "Tocharian Brahmi", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The great surprise of Indo-European studies: Buddhist manuscripts from desert oases in western China turned out to hide the family's easternmost branch — two languages closer in some ways to Latin and Celtic than to neighbouring Indo-Iranian. Extinct by c. 900 CE.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "khmer", "name": "Khmer", "endonym": "ភាសាខ្មែរ — Phéasa Khmêr", "timeLabel": "Inscription of 611", "displayYear": "611", "sortYear": 611, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Cambodia", "family": "Austroasiatic", "branch": "Khmeric", "script": "Khmer script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Continuously written since 611 CE, Khmer is among the oldest documented living languages of Southeast Asia and the tongue of Angkor's temple-builders. Its script has the largest alphabet officially recognised anywhere — 74 letters by the traditional Guinness count.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "pictish", "name": "Pictish", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Symbol stones, c. 6th–9th century CE", "displayYear": "c. 600", "sortYear": 600, "region": "Europe", "place": "Northern & eastern Scotland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Brittonic) — per current consensus", "script": "Pictish symbols & ogham — unreadable", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Picts covered Scotland with carved stones — crescents, double-discs, beasts — and a scatter of ogham inscriptions that refuse to yield sense. Scholars now mostly agree the language was Brittonic Celtic, but the symbol system remains one of Europe's last undeciphered scripts.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "telugu", "name": "Telugu", "endonym": "తెలుగు", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. 575", "displayYear": "c. 575", "sortYear": 575, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Andhra Pradesh & Telangana, India", "family": "Dravidian", "branch": "South-Central Dravidian", "script": "Telugu script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Spoken by over 80 million people, Telugu emerges in royal inscriptions of the 6th century. Renaissance traveller Niccolò de' Conti called it 'the Italian of the East' for the way nearly every word ends in a vowel — a musicality prized in its classical poetry.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "mon", "name": "Mon", "endonym": "ဘာသာမန်", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions, 6th century", "displayYear": "c. 550", "sortYear": 550, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Lower Myanmar & central Thailand", "family": "Austroasiatic", "branch": "Monic", "script": "Mon script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The great civiliser of mainland Southeast Asia: the Mon brought Theravada Buddhism and Indian letters to the region, and their script became the mother of written Burmese and influenced Thai and Lao. Once an imperial language, Mon is now spoken by a shrinking minority.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "khotanese-saka", "name": "Khotanese (Saka)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Documents from c. 5th–10th century", "displayYear": "c. 500", "sortYear": 500, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Khotan oasis, Tarim Basin", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern) — Saka", "script": "Brahmi script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, on the southern Silk Road, wrote its Iranian Saka language in Indian Brahmi letters — a perfect specimen of Central Asia's layered world. Its speakers descended from the Sakas, the eastern Scythians who once raided and traded across the steppe.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "caucasian-albanian", "name": "Caucasian Albanian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Alphabet c. 5th century; palimpsests deciphered 2000s", "displayYear": "c. 450", "sortYear": 460, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "Caucasian Albania — modern Azerbaijan", "family": "Northeast Caucasian (Lezgic)", "branch": null, "script": "Caucasian Albanian alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A lost Christian literature found under another: the alphabet of Caucasian Albania was known only from one manuscript chart until scholars noticed erased writing beneath Georgian text in Sinai palimpsests — and deciphered a whole liturgical language in the 2000s. Tiny Udi, spoken in two villages, is its heir.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "kannada", "name": "Kannada", "endonym": "ಕನ್ನಡ", "timeLabel": "Halmidi inscription, c. 450", "displayYear": "c. 450", "sortYear": 450, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Karnataka, India", "family": "Dravidian", "branch": "South Dravidian", "script": "Kannada script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "One of India's classical languages, first carved in the Halmidi inscription around 450 CE, with earlier Kannada words scattered through others' texts — including, remarkably, in ancient Greek comedy papyri from Egypt, evidence of Indian Ocean trade chatter.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "georgian", "name": "Georgian", "endonym": "ქართული — Kartuli", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions, c. 430", "displayYear": "c. 430", "sortYear": 430, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "Georgia (oldest inscription: a Georgian monastery near Bethlehem)", "family": "Kartvelian", "branch": null, "script": "Asomtavruli → Nuskhuri → Mkhedruli", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Flagship of the Kartvelian family — one of the world's few primary language families with just a handful of members, native to the Caucasus mountains. Georgian has been written in three successive alphabets of its own, all still alive in church and state use.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "armenian", "name": "Armenian", "endonym": "Հայերեն — Hayeren", "timeLabel": "Alphabet created 405", "displayYear": "405", "sortYear": 405, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "Armenian Highlands", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Armenian — its own branch", "script": "Armenian alphabet (Mesrop Mashtots)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "living", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "In 405 CE the monk Mesrop Mashtots designed an alphabet so well fitted to Armenian that it is still used virtually unchanged sixteen centuries later. A golden age of translation followed, preserving Greek works whose originals are lost — Armenian as a time-vault of antiquity.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-slavic", "name": "Proto-Slavic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — spoken c. 300–500 CE", "displayYear": "c. 400", "sortYear": 400, "region": "Europe", "place": "Homeland debated — roughly between the Vistula and Dnieper", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Slavic", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Astonishingly recent for the ancestor of 300 million speakers' languages: Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian all diverged from a language still essentially unified around 500 CE — younger than written English's ancestors. Its rapid spread across half of Europe remains a subject of research.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "irish-old-irish", "name": "Irish (Old Irish)", "endonym": "Goídelc — modern Gaeilge", "timeLabel": "Ogham stones from c. 4th century", "displayYear": "c. 400", "sortYear": 390, "region": "Europe", "place": "Ireland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Goidelic)", "script": "Ogham, then Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Runes & Ogham", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Irish first appears as notches carved along the edges of standing stones — the ogham alphabet, unlike any other in Europe. Medieval Irish monks went on to create Western Europe's oldest vernacular literature after Greek and Latin, and Irish is still spoken in the Gaeltacht today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "gothic", "name": "Gothic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Wulfila's Bible, c. 350s", "displayYear": "c. 350", "sortYear": 355, "region": "Europe", "place": "Lower Danube; manuscript made in Ostrogothic Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (East)", "script": "Gothic alphabet (invented by Wulfila)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The only substantially recorded East Germanic language, preserved in Bishop Wulfila's 4th-century Bible translation — most gloriously in the Codex Argenteus, silver ink on purple parchment. The entire eastern branch of Germanic is now utterly extinct.", "datingNote": "A form of Gothic may have survived in Crimea into the 18th century — a Flemish diplomat recorded a wordlist in the 1560s — but its exact relationship to Wulfila's Gothic is debated." }, { "id": "cham", "name": "Cham", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Đông Yên Châu inscription, c. 4th century", "displayYear": "c. 350", "sortYear": 350, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Champa — central Vietnam", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Chamic", "script": "Cham script (Brahmi-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The oldest surviving text in any Austronesian language — a family that stretches from Madagascar to Easter Island — belongs to Cham, language of the vanished kingdom of Champa. Its speakers today are a small minority in Vietnam and Cambodia.", "datingNote": "The inscription's date, c. 4th century CE, is estimated from letter forms rather than a written date." }, { "id": "ge-ez", "name": "Geʽez", "endonym": "ግዕዝ", "timeLabel": "Vocalized inscriptions, c. 340s", "displayYear": "c. 340s", "sortYear": 345, "region": "Africa", "place": "Kingdom of Aksum, Ethiopia & Eritrea", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Ethiopic", "script": "Geʽez abugida", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The sacred language of Ethiopian and Eritrean Christianity and Judaism, in continuous liturgical use for 1,700 years. Its script uniquely evolved vowel-marking under King Ezana, and its manuscript tradition preserved works — like the Book of Enoch — lost everywhere else on Earth.", "datingNote": "Unvocalized proto-Geʽez inscriptions and South Arabian-script texts in Ethiopia reach back several centuries earlier, possibly to c. 800 BCE." }, { "id": "sogdian", "name": "Sogdian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "'Ancient Letters', c. 313", "displayYear": "c. 313", "sortYear": 313, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Samarkand & the Silk Road", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern)", "script": "Sogdian script (Aramaic-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The lingua franca of the Silk Road: Sogdian merchants' letters, abandoned in a watchtower near Dunhuang around 313 CE, still carry news of fires, marriages, and ruined business. Its script, written vertically, became the ancestor of Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu writing.", "datingNote": "One tiny descendant survives: Yaghnobi, spoken by a few thousand people in a remote Tajik valley." }, { "id": "coptic", "name": "Coptic", "endonym": "ⲘⲉⲧⲢⲉⲙ̀ⲛⲭⲏⲙⲓ", "timeLabel": "Literary from c. 3rd century", "displayYear": "c. 300", "sortYear": 290, "region": "Africa", "place": "Egypt", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Egyptian — final stage", "script": "Coptic alphabet (Greek + Demotic letters)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Ancient Egyptian's last act: the same language once carved in hieroglyphs, now written in Greek letters. Coptic died as a street language in the medieval period but still resounds in Coptic Christian liturgy — the final living thread of a 5,000-year linguistic lineage.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "arabic", "name": "Arabic", "endonym": "العربية — al-ʿArabiyya", "timeLabel": "Attested by 328 CE; earlier texts debated", "displayYear": "c. 328", "sortYear": 250, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Arabian Peninsula & Syrian desert", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Central", "script": "Nabataean Aramaic → Arabic script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "From desert epitaphs to the language of the Qur'an and of 400+ million people. The Namara epitaph of 328 CE, honouring a 'king of all the Arabs', is a landmark of early Arabic; three centuries later the language would carry a new faith across half the world.", "datingNote": "Tens of thousands of earlier Safaitic and Hismaic graffiti (from c. 1st century BCE) record Old Arabic dialects — where exactly 'Arabic' begins among them is an active scholarly question." }, { "id": "mandaic", "name": "Mandaic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 3rd century CE", "displayYear": "c. 250", "sortYear": 250, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Southern Iraq & Iranian Khuzestan", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Aramaic (Eastern)", "script": "Mandaic script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The sacred Aramaic of the Mandaeans — the last surviving Gnostic religion on Earth, whose scriptures honour John the Baptist. Classical Mandaic lives in the Ginza Rabba and in incantation bowls buried under Mesopotamian thresholds; its spoken heir, Neo-Mandaic, is down to a few hundred speakers.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "middle-persian-pahlavi", "name": "Middle Persian (Pahlavi)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from the 3rd century CE", "displayYear": "c. 240", "sortYear": 240, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Sasanian Persia — Iran", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Western)", "script": "Pahlavi scripts (Aramaic-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The imperial tongue of the Sasanians, written in one of history's most maddening scripts — Pahlavi spelled many Persian words as Aramaic ones, to be read aloud in Persian, like writing '&' and saying 'and'. Zoroastrian priests kept copying Pahlavi books for a thousand years after the empire fell.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-norse", "name": "Proto-Norse", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Runic inscriptions from c. 150 CE", "displayYear": "c. 150", "sortYear": 160, "region": "Europe", "place": "Denmark & southern Scandinavia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic (North)", "script": "Elder Futhark runes", "scriptGroup": "Runes & Ogham", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The earliest directly recorded Germanic speech: single words and names cut into combs, spearheads, and stones in the oldest runic alphabet. The Vimose comb (c. 150 CE), inscribed simply 'harja', may be the first written word of the entire Germanic world.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "epi-olmec", "name": "Epi-Olmec", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "La Mojarra stela, c. 156 CE; earlier debated", "displayYear": "c. 150", "sortYear": 150, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": "Possibly Mixe–Zoquean", "script": "Isthmian script — undeciphered", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "A lengthy, sophisticated script from ancient Mexico that no one can securely read. A proposed decipherment as Mixe–Zoquean — the family of the Olmecs' likely heirs — remains contested. Somewhere in these glyphs may be the voice of Mesoamerica's 'mother culture'.", "datingNote": "A published decipherment exists but failed independent verification tests; the script remains officially unread." }, { "id": "bactrian", "name": "Bactrian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Rabatak inscription, c. 127 CE", "displayYear": "c. 127", "sortYear": 130, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Bactria — northern Afghanistan", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern)", "script": "Greek alphabet (plus the letter þ 'sho')", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Alexander's strangest legacy: an Iranian language written in Greek letters for a thousand years. The Kushan emperor Kanishka proclaimed in the Rabatak inscription that he issued his edicts 'in the Aryan language' — Bactrian, dressed in the alphabet the Greeks left behind in Afghanistan.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "basque", "name": "Basque", "endonym": "Euskara", "timeLabel": "Aquitanian names, 1st–3rd century CE", "displayYear": "c. 100", "sortYear": 100, "region": "Europe", "place": "Western Pyrenees — Spain & France", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Latin alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Europe's living fossil: Basque is related to no other known language and almost certainly predates the arrival of Indo-European in Europe — a survivor, perhaps, of the continent's Stone Age speech. Roman-era inscriptions preserve Aquitanian names that are recognisably its ancestor.", "datingNote": "The 'Hand of Irulegi' (c. 1st century BCE), announced in 2022, may be the oldest Basque-related text — its interpretation is still hotly debated." }, { "id": "syriac", "name": "Syriac", "endonym": "ܠܫܢܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ — Leššānā Suryāyā", "timeLabel": "Inscription of 6 CE", "displayYear": "6 CE", "sortYear": 6, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Edessa (Urfa, Turkey)", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Aramaic", "script": "Syriac script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The literary golden child of Aramaic: Syriac carried Christianity to India and China, and its scholars translated Greek philosophy centuries before Europe rediscovered it — a crucial link in the chain that led to the Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "pali", "name": "Pali", "endonym": "Pāḷi", "timeLabel": "Canon composed orally; written c. 1st century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 100 BCE", "sortYear": -80, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Northern India; canon written down in Sri Lanka", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Middle)", "script": "No script of its own — written in many local scripts", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "oral", "blurb": "The language of the Theravada Buddhist canon, close to dialects the Buddha himself may have spoken. Monks preserved the entire vast corpus by communal chanting for centuries; tradition holds it was first committed to palm leaves in Sri Lanka around 29 BCE.", "datingNote": "Pali is a purely literary language — it may never have been anyone's precise mother tongue, but rather a standardised blend of related dialects." }, { "id": "celtiberian", "name": "Celtiberian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Botorrita plaques, c. 100s BCE", "displayYear": "c. 150 BCE", "sortYear": -150, "region": "Europe", "place": "North-central Iberia, Spain", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Continental)", "script": "Celtiberian semi-syllabary", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Celts of Spain adapted the Iberian script to their own tongue, leaving the longest ancient Celtic texts known — the bronze Botorrita plaques, apparently legal documents. All Continental Celtic died under Rome; only the Atlantic fringe survived.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "nabataean", "name": "Nabataean", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 2nd century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 150 BCE", "sortYear": -150, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Petra & the Arabian trade routes", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Aramaic", "script": "Nabataean abjad", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The merchant princes of Petra wrote Aramaic but spoke Arabic at home — and their flowing chancery script, evolving on tomb façades and desert graffiti, slowly became the Arabic alphabet itself. Every line of Arabic written today descends from Nabataean penmanship.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "numidian-ancient-berber", "name": "Numidian (Ancient Berber)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. 2nd century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 150 BCE", "sortYear": -160, "region": "Africa", "place": "Numidia — Tunisia, Algeria", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Berber (Amazigh)", "script": "Libyco-Berber script", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "North Africa's indigenous writing: the geometric Libyco-Berber script appears on monuments like the bilingual dedication at Dougga (138 BCE). Its direct descendant, Tifinagh, was kept alive for two millennia by Tuareg women teaching children in the sand — and is now official in Morocco.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "umbrian", "name": "Umbrian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Iguvine Tables, c. 3rd–1st century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 200 BCE", "sortYear": -200, "region": "Europe", "place": "Umbria, Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Italic (Sabellic)", "script": "Umbrian & Latin alphabets", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Almost everything we know of Umbrian comes from one astonishing find: seven bronze tablets from Gubbio recording, in obsessive detail, the rituals of a priestly brotherhood — the longest religious text surviving from ancient Italy, in a language that is not Latin but rhymes with it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "sinhala", "name": "Sinhala", "endonym": "සිංහල", "timeLabel": "Cave inscriptions, c. 3rd–2nd century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 200 BCE", "sortYear": -220, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Sri Lanka", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Insular)", "script": "Brahmi → Sinhala script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Carried to Sri Lanka by settlers from northern India, Sinhala began recording itself in Buddhist cave donations over two millennia ago and never stopped — its chronicle tradition, the Mahāvaṃsa, is among the longest continuous written histories anywhere.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "gaulish", "name": "Gaulish", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 3rd century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 250 BCE", "sortYear": -250, "region": "Europe", "place": "Gaul — France, northern Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Continental)", "script": "Greek, then Latin letters", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The language of Vercingetorix and the druids, who famously distrusted writing — yet Gauls left calendars, curses, and pottery accounts in borrowed Greek and Latin letters. Gaulish faded under Rome, but hundreds of French words and place names still whisper it.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "prakrit-ashokan", "name": "Prakrit (Ashokan)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Edicts of Ashoka, c. 250 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 250 BCE", "sortYear": -255, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Mauryan Empire — across India", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Middle)", "script": "Brahmi & Kharoshthi", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "After the bloody conquest of Kalinga, Emperor Ashoka carved edicts of remorse and moral governance across the subcontinent — the earliest securely dated and deciphered writing of historic India, and the debut of Brahmi, ancestor of nearly every script from Delhi to Bali.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tamil", "name": "Tamil", "endonym": "தமிழ்", "timeLabel": "Tamil-Brahmi, c. 3rd century BCE (earlier claims debated)", "displayYear": "c. 250 BCE", "sortYear": -260, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Tamil Nadu, India & Sri Lanka", "family": "Dravidian", "branch": "South Dravidian", "script": "Tamil-Brahmi → Tamil script", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Arguably the oldest living literary tradition in India: Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions from around the 3rd century BCE lead into the Sangam poems — vivid classical verse about love, war, and the sea — in a language whose modern form its speakers can still connect to. Some 80 million speak it today.", "datingNote": "Excavations at Keeladi have prompted claims of Tamil writing as early as the 6th century BCE; these dates are still being tested and debated." }, { "id": "meroitic", "name": "Meroitic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Script from c. 300 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 300 BCE", "sortYear": -290, "region": "Africa", "place": "Kingdom of Kush — Meroë, Sudan", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": "Possibly Northern East Sudanic", "script": "Meroitic hieroglyphic & cursive", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Kushite kingdom that once conquered Egypt eventually shed Egyptian and wrote its own language in Africa's first indigenous alphabet-like script. We can pronounce Meroitic — the sound values were cracked a century ago — but we still understand only fragments of what it says.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "maya-classic-mayan", "name": "Maya (Classic Mayan)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Writing by c. 300 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 300 BCE", "sortYear": -300, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico", "family": "Mayan", "branch": "Ch'olan (classical literary form)", "script": "Maya hieroglyphs", "scriptGroup": "Hieroglyphs", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The only pre-Columbian American script we can genuinely read: a full writing system recording history, astronomy, and myth. Its decipherment in the late 20th century resurrected a thousand years of named kings. Thirty Mayan languages, spoken by ~6 million people, live on today.", "datingNote": "Earliest Maya writing (San Bartolo murals, c. 300–200 BCE) is dated by radiocarbon and style; the tradition may begin somewhat earlier." }, { "id": "illyrian", "name": "Illyrian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Known only from names, c. 4th century BCE onward", "displayYear": "c. 350 BCE", "sortYear": -350, "region": "Europe", "place": "Western Balkans — the Adriatic coast", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Illyrian — its own branch", "script": "Never written by its speakers", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A cautionary entry: Illyrian was spoken across the western Balkans for centuries, yet not a single sentence survives — only personal and place names embedded in Greek and Latin texts. Whether Albanian descends from it is therefore probably unanswerable forever.", "datingNote": "With no texts, every claim about Illyrian rests on names alone — the thinnest evidence linguistics ever works with." }, { "id": "proto-turkic", "name": "Proto-Turkic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 1st millennium BCE", "displayYear": "c. 500 BCE", "sortYear": -400, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Homeland debated — eastern Steppe / Mongolia region", "family": "Turkic", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The reconstructed ancestor of Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Yakut. Its earliest split — the branch leading to Chuvash — lets linguists triangulate a proto-language of steppe herders whose descendants would ride from Siberia to the gates of Vienna.", "datingNote": "Dating relies on loanword layers and the first historical mentions of Turkic peoples; estimates vary by many centuries." }, { "id": "oscan", "name": "Oscan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 400 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 400 BCE", "sortYear": -400, "region": "Europe", "place": "Samnium & Campania, Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Italic (Sabellic)", "script": "Oscan alphabet (Etruscan-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Latin's great Italian rival: Oscan was the language of the Samnites, who fought Rome for a century, and it was still being painted on Pompeii's walls when Vesuvius sealed them. Rome's victory in the Social War doomed it — by the empire, Italy spoke Latin alone.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "iberian", "name": "Iberian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 5th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 450 BCE", "sortYear": -430, "region": "Europe", "place": "Mediterranean coast of Spain", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": null, "script": "Northeastern Iberian semi-syllabary", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "We can read every Iberian inscription aloud — the script was cracked in the 1920s — yet understand almost none of it: the language matches nothing else known, resisting even comparison with Basque. Two thousand texts of lead and stone, pronounceable but mute.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "lycian", "name": "Lycian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions, c. 5th–4th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 450 BCE", "sortYear": -440, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Lycia — southwestern Turkey", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Anatolian", "script": "Lycian alphabet (Greek-related)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Carved on cliff tombs above the turquoise coast, Lycian was a late child of the Anatolian branch — a descendant of Luwian. The trilingual Létôon stele (337 BCE), in Lycian, Greek, and Aramaic, cracked the language open exactly as the Rosetta Stone later would for Egyptian.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-japonic", "name": "Proto-Japonic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 1st millennium BCE", "displayYear": "c. 700 BCE", "sortYear": -450, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Likely Korean Peninsula → Japanese archipelago", "family": "Japonic", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The ancestor of Japanese and the endangered Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa. Many researchers link its arrival in Japan to the Yayoi rice-farming migrations from the Korean Peninsula — a story being actively rewritten by archaeology, genetics, and linguistics together.", "datingNote": "Both the dating and the peninsula homeland are debated; a proposed link to Korean remains unproven." }, { "id": "thracian", "name": "Thracian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Ezerovo ring, c. 5th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 450 BCE", "sortYear": -450, "region": "Europe", "place": "Thrace — Bulgaria & northern Greece", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Thracian — its own branch", "script": "Greek letters", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The Thracians — Spartacus's people, famed warriors and goldsmiths — left almost no writing: a gold ring from Ezerovo carries 61 Greek letters of Thracian that can be pronounced but not securely understood. A whole Indo-European branch reduced to a handful of unreadable lines.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-germanic", "name": "Proto-Germanic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — spoken c. 500 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 500 BCE", "sortYear": -480, "region": "Europe", "place": "Southern Scandinavia & northern Germany", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Germanic", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The unwritten ancestor of English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, defined by Grimm's Law — the great consonant shift that turned Indo-European *p into f (compare Latin 'pater', English 'father'). Reconstructed sound by sound from its daughters.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "lydian", "name": "Lydian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions, c. 7th–4th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 600 BCE", "sortYear": -500, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Sardis, western Anatolia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Anatolian", "script": "Lydian alphabet (Greek-related)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The language of King Croesus, proverbially the richest man alive — Lydia minted the world's first coins. Together with its cousins Lycian and Carian, it was a last echo of the ancient Anatolian branch, which vanished entirely under Greek by the 1st century BCE.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "zapotec-monte-alban", "name": "Zapotec (Monte Albán)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Monuments c. 500 BCE; earlier debated", "displayYear": "c. 500 BCE", "sortYear": -510, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Oaxaca Valley, Mexico", "family": "Oto-Manguean", "branch": "Zapotecan", "script": "Zapotec glyphs — largely undeciphered", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Possibly the oldest writing in the Americas: carved captives and calendar signs at Monte Albán and San José Mogote. The ancient glyphs remain largely unread, but Zapotec itself never died — half a million people in Oaxaca still speak its modern descendants.", "datingNote": "The San José Mogote slab, sometimes dated c. 600 BCE, is contested — both its date and whether its glyphs constitute true writing." }, { "id": "old-persian", "name": "Old Persian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Behistun inscription, c. 520 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 520 BCE", "sortYear": -520, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Achaemenid Persia — Iran", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian", "script": "Old Persian cuneiform (invented for the kings)", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Darius the Great had his triumph carved into a cliff at Behistun in three languages — and that trilingual boast became the key that unlocked all of cuneiform, as the Rosetta Stone did for Egypt. Old Persian is the direct ancestor of the Persian spoken today.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "messapic", "name": "Messapic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 550 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 550 BCE", "sortYear": -530, "region": "Europe", "place": "Puglia — the heel of Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Uncertain — possibly related to Albanian's ancestors", "script": "Greek-derived alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Six hundred short inscriptions from Italy's heel record Messapic, plausibly brought across the Adriatic from the Balkans. Its most intriguing role is genealogical: some linguists see in it a cousin of whatever ancient Balkan speech later surfaced as Albanian.", "datingNote": "The Albanian–Messapic connection is a live hypothesis, not a consensus; the Balkan side of the comparison was never written down." }, { "id": "venetic", "name": "Venetic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 550 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 550 BCE", "sortYear": -540, "region": "Europe", "place": "Veneto, northeastern Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Uncertain — near Italic", "script": "Venetic alphabet (Etruscan-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The pre-Roman language of Venice's namesakes, known from hundreds of short votive offerings — bronze styluses and plaques dedicated to the goddess Reitia. Venetic sits tantalisingly close to Latin on the family tree, but exactly how close is still argued.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "lepontic", "name": "Lepontic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 600 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 600 BCE", "sortYear": -570, "region": "Europe", "place": "Alpine lakes region, northern Italy & Switzerland", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic (Continental)", "script": "Alphabet of Lugano (Etruscan-derived)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The earliest written Celtic language — brief grave and pot inscriptions from the Italian lakes, in an alphabet borrowed from the Etruscans. A reminder that the Celts, later famed as a people of pure oral tradition, wrote when it suited them.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "carian", "name": "Carian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 7th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 600 BCE", "sortYear": -600, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Caria, Turkey — and Egypt, via mercenaries", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Anatolian", "script": "Carian alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Deciphered in reverse: Carian mercenaries serving Egypt's pharaohs scratched their names beside Egyptian ones at Saqqara and Abu Simbel, and those bilingual soldiers' graffiti — not texts from Caria itself — finally unlocked the alphabet in the 1980s and 90s.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "latin", "name": "Latin", "endonym": "Lingua Latina", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 7th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 650 BCE", "sortYear": -640, "region": "Europe", "place": "Latium — Rome, Italy", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Italic", "script": "Latin alphabet (adapted from Etruscan)", "scriptGroup": "Latin alphabet", "status": "classical", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "From scratched dedications on brooches to the language of law, science, and the Mass. Latin never truly died — it dissolved into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, spoken today by nearly a billion people, while its classical form still serves church and scholarship.", "datingNote": "The oldest Latin inscriptions (Praeneste fibula, Lapis Niger) date to c. 640–550 BCE; the fibula was long suspected a forgery but is now considered genuine." }, { "id": "etruscan", "name": "Etruscan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 700 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 700 BCE", "sortYear": -700, "region": "Europe", "place": "Etruria — Tuscany, Italy", "family": "Tyrsenian", "branch": "Language isolate family", "script": "Etruscan alphabet (from Euboean Greek)", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Rome's teachers wrote 13,000 surviving texts, yet Etruscan remains only half-understood — not Indo-European, related to almost nothing. Its greatest legacy is the alphabet it passed to Rome, ancestor of the letters on this screen.", "datingNote": "Its only proposed relatives are Raetic (Alps) and Lemnian (a single Aegean island stele) — the tiny, mysterious 'Tyrsenian' family." }, { "id": "proto-algonquian", "name": "Proto-Algonquian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 1st millennium BCE", "displayYear": "c. 800 BCE", "sortYear": -700, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Homeland debated — around the western Great Lakes", "family": "Algonquian", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The best-reconstructed proto-language of the Americas, ancestor of Cree, Ojibwe, Cheyenne, and the coastal languages that met the Pilgrims. Leonard Bloomfield's classic reconstruction proved the comparative method works identically on unwritten languages — a landmark for the whole field.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "tartessian", "name": "Tartessian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Southwest inscriptions, c. 750–500 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 700 BCE", "sortYear": -720, "region": "Europe", "place": "Southwestern Iberia — Portugal & Spain", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": null, "script": "Southwest Paleohispanic script", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Western Europe's oldest written language: nearly a hundred stone slabs from the region of legendary silver-rich Tartessos, their spiralling letters partly readable but their meaning lost. A controversial theory calls it early Celtic; most scholars remain unconvinced.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "phrygian", "name": "Phrygian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Old Phrygian, c. 8th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 750 BCE", "sortYear": -750, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Gordion, central Anatolia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Phrygian — possibly closest to Greek", "script": "Phrygian alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The language of King Midas of the golden touch — a real 8th-century BCE ruler whose monuments bear some of the earliest alphabetic writing in Anatolia. Linguists suspect Phrygian was Greek's closest sibling, a family resemblance visible even in its short surviving texts.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "old-south-arabian-sabaic", "name": "Old South Arabian (Sabaic)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions by c. 800 BCE, possibly earlier", "displayYear": "c. 800 BCE", "sortYear": -800, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Yemen — kingdom of Saba (Sheba)", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — South Arabian", "script": "Ancient South Arabian (musnad)", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The monumental script of the incense kingdoms — including Saba, the biblical Sheba — carved in elegant geometric letters on temples and dams. Its script crossed the Red Sea to become Ethiopia's Geʽez abugida, still used today.", "datingNote": "Recent finds push the earliest South Arabian writing toward the 10th century BCE; precise dating is unsettled." }, { "id": "urartian", "name": "Urartian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions, c. 830–640 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 830 BCE", "sortYear": -830, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Kingdom of Urartu — Lake Van, Armenia highlands", "family": "Hurro-Urartian", "branch": null, "script": "Cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Assyria's stubborn northern rival carved its royal boasts around Lake Van in a language related only to Hurrian — the small, doomed Hurro-Urartian family. When Urartu fell, Armenian speakers inherited the highlands, absorbing Urartian words like grape and apple into their Indo-European tongue.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "moabite", "name": "Moabite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Mesha Stele, c. 840 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 840 BCE", "sortYear": -840, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Moab — modern Jordan", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Canaanite", "script": "Phoenician-derived abjad", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "King Mesha of Moab raised a black basalt stele boasting of throwing off Israel's yoke — the same events the Hebrew Bible tells from the other side. It is one of archaeology's great cross-examinations: two neighbouring accounts of one war, in two sibling Canaanite languages.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "aramaic", "name": "Aramaic", "endonym": "ܐܪܡܝܐ / ארמיא", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 900 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 900 BCE", "sortYear": -880, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Aram — Syria", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Northwest", "script": "Aramaic abjad", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "endangered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The most successful language of the ancient Near East: chancellery tongue of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, everyday speech of Judea in the time of Jesus, and parent of the Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts. Neo-Aramaic survives today — endangered — in scattered communities.", "datingNote": "After nearly 3,000 continuous years, Aramaic's remaining dialects are now seriously endangered, their speakers dispersed by modern conflict." }, { "id": "hebrew-biblical", "name": "Hebrew (Biblical)", "endonym": "עברית", "timeLabel": "Inscriptions c. 10th century BCE (identifications debated)", "displayYear": "c. 1000 BCE", "sortYear": -975, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Judah & Israel — the southern Levant", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Canaanite", "script": "Paleo-Hebrew, later square (Aramaic-derived) script", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "revived", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The language of the Hebrew Bible, whose oldest layers preserve genuinely archaic poetry. Hebrew faded from daily speech around 200 CE, lived seventeen centuries as a language of scripture and scholarship, then did what no other language has done: came fully back to life.", "datingNote": "Whether the earliest inscriptions (Khirbet Qeiyafa, Gezer calendar) are Hebrew or a neighbouring Canaanite dialect is disputed — the dialects were then barely distinguishable." }, { "id": "phoenician", "name": "Phoenician", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscriptions from c. 1050 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1050 BCE", "sortYear": -1020, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Byblos, Tyre, Sidon — Lebanon", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Canaanite", "script": "Phoenician abjad — 22 letters", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The merchant sailors of Phoenicia perfected a 22-letter alphabet so simple and portable that it conquered the world: Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic — and by most accounts the scripts of India — all descend from it. Its Punic dialect survived in North Africa until Augustine's day.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "avestan", "name": "Avestan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Gathas composed c. 1200–1000 BCE (oral)", "displayYear": "c. 1000 BCE", "sortYear": -1050, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Central Asia / eastern Iran (exact homeland debated)", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Iranian (Eastern)", "script": "Oral for ~2,000 years; Avestan alphabet c. 5th–6th century CE", "scriptGroup": "Other alphabets & abugidas", "status": "liturgical", "evidence": "oral", "blurb": "The hymns of Zarathustra were memorised and chanted for roughly two thousand years before anyone wrote them down — and the oldest surviving manuscripts are medieval. Zoroastrian priests still recite Avestan prayers whose sounds crystallised over three millennia ago.", "datingNote": "The Gathas' dating (c. 1200–1000 BCE) rests entirely on linguistic comparison with the Rigveda; no physical text existed for two millennia — a spectacular case of oral transmission." }, { "id": "proto-celtic", "name": "Proto-Celtic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 1300–800 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1000 BCE", "sortYear": -1100, "region": "Europe", "place": "Central Europe (traditional view) — homeland debated", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Celtic", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Ancestor of Irish, Welsh, Breton, and the vanished Celtic of the Continent. Traditionally tied to the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, though a rival 'Celtic from the West' theory roots it on the Atlantic coast — a live controversy in both linguistics and archaeology.", "datingNote": "Both the homeland and the dating are actively debated; reconstruction is certain, geography is not." }, { "id": "proto-oceanic", "name": "Proto-Oceanic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 1200 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1200 BCE", "sortYear": -1150, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": "Oceanic", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The reconstructed mother of some 450 Pacific languages — Fijian, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, Māori. Its speakers are firmly identified with the Lapita culture, the master navigators whose canoes carried words like *tasik ('sea') across a third of the planet.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "chinese-old-chinese", "name": "Chinese (Old Chinese)", "endonym": "中文 — from oracle bone inscriptions", "timeLabel": "Oracle bones, c. 1250 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1250 BCE", "sortYear": -1250, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Anyang — Shang dynasty, Yellow River valley", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": "Sinitic", "script": "Oracle bone script → Chinese characters", "scriptGroup": "East Asian characters", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Shang kings asked their ancestors questions by cracking heated ox bones — and wrote the answers. From those divinations descends the world's oldest writing system still in use: a Chinese reader today can recognise characters carved 3,200 years ago. Sinitic languages now claim 1.3 billion speakers.", "datingNote": "Writing likely predates the oracle bones — they are already fully developed — but earlier Chinese writing, perhaps on perishable bamboo or silk, has not survived." }, { "id": "ugaritic", "name": "Ugaritic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Tablets, c. 1300–1190 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1300 BCE", "sortYear": -1280, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Ugarit — Ras Shamra, Syria", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Northwest", "script": "Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform — 30 signs", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "A brilliant hybrid: alphabet-sized simplicity pressed into clay like cuneiform. Ugarit's scribes even left abecedaries — practice tablets listing letters in an order that, astonishingly, still underlies our ABC. Its Baal epics illuminate the world the Hebrew Bible grew from.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "sanskrit-vedic", "name": "Sanskrit (Vedic)", "endonym": "संस्कृतम् — Saṃskṛtam", "timeLabel": "Rigveda composed c. 1500–1200 BCE (oral)", "displayYear": "c. 1300 BCE", "sortYear": -1300, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Punjab & the northwestern Indian subcontinent", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Aryan (Old)", "script": "Oral for over a millennium; later Brahmi-derived scripts", "scriptGroup": "Brahmic & Indic scripts", "status": "classical", "evidence": "oral", "blurb": "The Rigveda's 1,028 hymns were composed around 3,300 years ago and transmitted with syllable-perfect precision by memory alone — for well over a thousand years before anyone wrote them down. Sanskrit remains India's great classical and liturgical language, and its discovery by European scholars founded the entire science of historical linguistics.", "datingNote": "The composition dates (c. 1500–1200 BCE) rest on linguistic and internal evidence — no manuscript survives from within two millennia of them. The oldest physical Rigveda manuscripts are medieval." }, { "id": "greek-mycenaean", "name": "Greek (Mycenaean)", "endonym": "Ελληνικά", "timeLabel": "Linear B tablets, c. 1400 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1400 BCE", "sortYear": -1400, "region": "Europe", "place": "Knossos & Pylos — Crete and mainland Greece", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Hellenic", "script": "Linear B → Greek alphabet (c. 800 BCE)", "scriptGroup": "Greek & Cyrillic", "status": "living", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "When architect Michael Ventris cracked Linear B in 1952, the palace inventories turned out to be Greek — centuries older than Homer. With 3,400 years on record, Greek has the longest documented history of any living European language, and its later alphabet was the first to write every vowel.", "datingNote": "Between the fall of the Mycenaean palaces (c. 1200 BCE) and the alphabet (c. 800 BCE), Greek went unwritten for four centuries — a language surviving its own writing system's death." }, { "id": "luwian", "name": "Luwian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Attested c. 16th–14th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1400 BCE", "sortYear": -1450, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Southern & western Anatolia", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Anatolian", "script": "Anatolian hieroglyphs & cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Hieroglyphs", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "Hittite's sister language, written in its own indigenous hieroglyphs — one of the few scripts invented in the ancient world outside Mesopotamia and Egypt. Some scholars argue Luwian was the street language of Troy, which would make it the real language of the Trojan War.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "kassite", "name": "Kassite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Names & wordlists, c. 16th–12th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1500 BCE", "sortYear": -1500, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Babylonia — dynasty from the Zagros mountains", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": null, "script": "Recorded in cuneiform by Babylonian scribes", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Kassites ruled Babylon longer than any other dynasty — over four centuries — yet wrote their own language almost never, adopting Akkadian instead. All that survives is names and two scribal wordlists: a great power whose voice is essentially lost, relatives unknown.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "hattic", "name": "Hattic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Recorded in Hittite archives, c. 16th century BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1500 BCE", "sortYear": -1550, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Central Anatolia — Hattusa", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Cuneiform (in Hittite ritual tablets)", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The pre-Indo-European voice of Anatolia: already dying when the Hittites arrived, Hattic survived only inside Hittite rituals, quoted like Latin in a modern Mass. Even the Hittites' name for their kingdom — 'the land of Hatti' — was borrowed from the people they replaced.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "hittite", "name": "Hittite", "endonym": "Nešili — 'the language of Nesa'", "timeLabel": "Tablets from c. 1650 BCE; names by c. 1950 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1650 BCE", "sortYear": -1650, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Hattusa — central Anatolia, Turkey", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Anatolian", "script": "Cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The oldest attested Indo-European language — English's most distant documented cousin. When Hittite tablets were deciphered in 1915, words like 'watar' (water) stunned scholars: an entire lost branch of our own language family, preserved in the archives of a forgotten superpower.", "datingNote": "Hittite names appear in Assyrian merchants' tablets from c. 1950 BCE, before Hittite texts proper — the earliest whisper of any Indo-European speech." }, { "id": "minoan", "name": "Minoan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Linear A, c. 1800–1450 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1800 BCE", "sortYear": -1750, "region": "Europe", "place": "Crete — Knossos, Phaistos", "family": "Unclassified", "branch": null, "script": "Linear A (and Cretan hieroglyphs, c. 2000 BCE)", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Europe's first civilisation wrote fluently — and we cannot read a word. Linear A's sound values can be guessed from its daughter Linear B, but the language underneath matches nothing known. The enigmatic Phaistos Disc, stamped rather than written, deepens the mystery.", "datingNote": "Cretan hieroglyphs (c. 2000 BCE) are Europe's oldest writing; whether the Phaistos Disc is even the same script is debated." }, { "id": "early-canaanite", "name": "Early Canaanite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, c. 1900–1700 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 1800 BCE", "sortYear": -1800, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Serabit el-Khadim (Sinai) & Wadi el-Hol (Egypt)", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Northwest", "script": "Proto-Sinaitic — the first alphabet", "scriptGroup": "Semitic abjads", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "In Egyptian turquoise mines, Semitic-speaking workers turned hieroglyphs into something revolutionary: about two dozen signs, each standing for a single sound. Every alphabet on Earth — Latin, Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic — descends from this graffiti of miners.", "datingNote": "Only partially readable; both the dating (c. 1900–1700 BCE) and most readings remain debated. The famous decipherable phrase is 'l-bʿlt' — 'for the Lady'." }, { "id": "amorite", "name": "Amorite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Names from c. 2000 BCE; bilingual tablets published 2023", "displayYear": "c. 1900 BCE", "sortYear": -1900, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Syria & Mesopotamia", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — Northwest", "script": "Recorded in cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The Amorites gave Babylon its most famous king — Hammurabi is an Amorite name — yet for a century scholars knew their language only from thousands of names. Then in 2023 two tablets surfaced bearing Amorite phrases with Akkadian translations: an ancient phrasebook, and a lost language's first sentences.", "datingNote": "The two bilingual tablets are unprovenanced, which complicates their interpretation; the language's outline still rests mostly on names." }, { "id": "proto-indo-iranian", "name": "Proto-Indo-Iranian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 2000 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2000 BCE", "sortYear": -2000, "region": "Central Asia & Steppe", "place": "Sintashta–Andronovo horizon, Urals & Kazakh steppe", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": "Indo-Iranian", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The common ancestor of Sanskrit and Avestan — and thus of Hindi, Bengali, Persian, Pashto, and a billion and a half people's languages. Linked to the chariot-building Sintashta culture, whose war technology and hymns spread together across Asia.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-mayan", "name": "Proto-Mayan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 2000 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2000 BCE", "sortYear": -2050, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Guatemalan highlands (likely homeland)", "family": "Mayan", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Reconstructed ancestor of the thirty Mayan languages, spoken around the time the first maize villages grew toward civilisation. Comparing K'iche', Yucatec, and their cousins lets linguists recover words for maize, writing, and calendar — the vocabulary of a culture about to invent history.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "hurrian", "name": "Hurrian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Inscription of Tish-atal, c. 2100 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2100 BCE", "sortYear": -2100, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Urkesh, Syria — later Mitanni empire", "family": "Hurro-Urartian", "branch": null, "script": "Cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Language of the Mitanni empire that once rivalled Egypt. A Hurrian tablet from Ugarit preserves the oldest written melody on Earth — the 'Hurrian Hymn' of c. 1400 BCE, a song to the goddess Nikkal that can still be played today, 3,400 years later.", "datingNote": "Related only to later Urartian; proposed links to Caucasian families remain speculative." }, { "id": "elamite", "name": "Elamite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Linear Elamite c. 2300 BCE; Proto-Elamite c. 3100 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2300 BCE", "sortYear": -2300, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Susa & Anshan — southwestern Iran", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Proto-Elamite, Linear Elamite, then cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "Iran's great pre-Persian civilisation wrote for nearly three millennia, ending as an official language of the Persian Empire — yet Elamite relates to nothing else known. Its earliest phase, Proto-Elamite, is the world's oldest still-undeciphered writing system.", "datingNote": "A 2022 claim to have deciphered Linear Elamite is promising but not universally accepted; Proto-Elamite (c. 3100 BCE) may record a different language entirely — no one knows." }, { "id": "akkadian", "name": "Akkadian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Texts from c. 2350 BCE; names earlier", "displayYear": "c. 2350 BCE", "sortYear": -2350, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Mesopotamia — Akkad, Babylon, Nineveh", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — East", "script": "Cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "The language of Sargon, Hammurabi's laws, and the Epic of Gilgamesh — humanity's first great work of literature. For over a thousand years Akkadian was the diplomatic language of the entire Near East; even pharaohs wrote their foreign mail in it.", "datingNote": "Akkadian personal names appear in Sumerian documents by c. 2600 BCE, before connected Akkadian texts." }, { "id": "eblaite", "name": "Eblaite", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Ebla archives, c. 2400 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2400 BCE", "sortYear": -2400, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Ebla — Tell Mardikh, Syria", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic — East", "script": "Cuneiform", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "written", "blurb": "In 1974 archaeologists opened a burned palace room in Syria and found 17,000 tablets and fragments — the archive of a forgotten empire. Eblaite, alongside Akkadian, is the oldest Semitic language ever recorded, complete with the world's earliest known bilingual dictionaries.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-uralic", "name": "Proto-Uralic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3000–2000 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2500 BCE", "sortYear": -2450, "region": "Europe", "place": "Homeland debated — Ural mountains or western Siberia", "family": "Uralic", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The forest-zone ancestor of Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and the Sámi and Samoyedic languages. Reconstructed words for spruce, bow, and rowing sketch a life of hunters among rivers and taiga — a family history written in vocabulary instead of documents.", "datingNote": "Homeland and dating are both debated; recent work tends to favour a more eastern, Siberian origin than older textbooks." }, { "id": "proto-bantu", "name": "Proto-Bantu", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 2500 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2500 BCE", "sortYear": -2500, "region": "Africa", "place": "Nigeria–Cameroon borderland", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": "Atlantic–Congo — Bantoid", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "From a homeland near the Nigeria–Cameroon border, speakers of Proto-Bantu began one of history's greatest expansions, carrying farming, iron, and their language across a third of Africa. Its ~500 descendants — Swahili, Zulu, Lingala, Shona — share the tell-tale noun-class prefixes reconstructed for their ancestor.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-kartvelian", "name": "Proto-Kartvelian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3rd millennium BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2500 BCE", "sortYear": -2600, "region": "Caucasus", "place": "South Caucasus", "family": "Kartvelian", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Ancestor of Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan — a compact, ancient family walled into the Caucasus, the mountain range Arab geographers called 'the mountain of tongues' for its staggering linguistic density.", "datingNote": "Dating estimates for the family's breakup vary widely; the Svan branch split earliest, perhaps by 2000 BCE." }, { "id": "indus-harappan", "name": "Indus (Harappan)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Signs on seals, c. 2600–1900 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 2600 BCE", "sortYear": -2600, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Indus Valley — Harappa & Mohenjo-daro", "family": "Unknown", "branch": null, "script": "Indus signs — undeciphered", "scriptGroup": "Undeciphered scripts", "status": "undeciphered", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "A civilisation of a million people, meticulously planned cities — and total silence. Thousands of exquisite seals carry short sign sequences that have defeated every decipherment attempt. We do not know what language the Indus people spoke, or even, with certainty, that the signs are writing.", "datingNote": "Everything is debated: whether the signs encode language at all, and rival Dravidian and other identifications of the underlying tongue. With no bilingual text and inscriptions averaging five signs, the mystery may never be solved." }, { "id": "proto-austroasiatic", "name": "Proto-Austroasiatic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3000 BCE (debated)", "displayYear": "c. 3000 BCE", "sortYear": -2850, "region": "Southeast Asia", "place": "Homeland debated — Mekong basin or eastern India", "family": "Austroasiatic", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Ancestor of Vietnamese, Khmer, and a hundred scattered languages from central India (Munda) to the Malay Peninsula. Its fragmented modern map suggests it once covered mainland Southeast Asia — before Tai, Burmese, and others spread over it like a new tide.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-uto-aztecan", "name": "Proto-Uto-Aztecan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3000 BCE (debated)", "displayYear": "c. 3000 BCE", "sortYear": -2900, "region": "The Americas", "place": "Homeland debated — western Mexico or the US Southwest", "family": "Uto-Aztecan", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The ancestor whose descendants stretched from Shoshone in the Rockies to Nahuatl in the Aztec Empire — one of the great language spans of the Americas. Whether its speakers were desert foragers moving south or early maize farmers moving north is a defining debate of American prehistory.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-dravidian", "name": "Proto-Dravidian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3rd millennium BCE (debated)", "displayYear": "c. 3000 BCE", "sortYear": -3000, "region": "South Asia", "place": "Homeland debated — peninsular India", "family": "Dravidian", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The ancestor of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam — some 250 million speakers — plus far-flung Brahui, stranded in Pakistan. The tantalising, unprovable question: was Dravidian the language of the Indus civilisation? Its undeciphered seals keep the secret.", "datingNote": "Dating estimates range from c. 4500 to 2500 BCE; the Indus connection, though popular, remains speculation." }, { "id": "sumerian", "name": "Sumerian", "endonym": "eme-ĝir — 'the native tongue'", "timeLabel": "Writing from c. 3200 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 3200 BCE", "sortYear": -3150, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Uruk — southern Mesopotamia, Iraq", "family": "Language isolate", "branch": null, "script": "Cuneiform (from proto-cuneiform, c. 3350 BCE)", "scriptGroup": "Cuneiform", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The first language ever written — probably. In the temple warehouses of Uruk, accountants pressing marks into clay invented history itself. Sumerian died as a mother tongue by c. 2000 BCE, then lived on as the Latin of Babylon for two thousand more years. It is related to no other known language.", "datingNote": "The very earliest tablets (c. 3350–3100 BCE) are numerical and pictographic; unambiguous Sumerian grammar appears by c. 2900 BCE. Writing began as bookkeeping — literature came centuries later." }, { "id": "egyptian", "name": "Egyptian", "endonym": "r n km.t — 'speech of the Black Land'", "timeLabel": "Labels from c. 3250 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 3250 BCE", "sortYear": -3200, "region": "Africa", "place": "Abydos & the Nile Valley, Egypt", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Egyptian — its own branch", "script": "Hieroglyphs → hieratic → demotic → Coptic", "scriptGroup": "Hieroglyphs", "status": "extinct", "evidence": "inscription", "blurb": "The longest continuously documented language in human history: from ivory tags in a tomb at Abydos, through four thousand years of hieroglyphs, to Coptic still chanted in churches today. The Rosetta Stone gave it back its voice in 1822 after fifteen silent centuries.", "datingNote": "Whether Egypt's earliest labels (c. 3250 BCE) predate Mesopotamia's first tablets is genuinely unresolved — the two-way race for 'first writing' may never have a winner." }, { "id": "proto-austronesian", "name": "Proto-Austronesian", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 3500–3000 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 3500 BCE", "sortYear": -3300, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Taiwan", "family": "Austronesian", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "From Taiwan, its descendants sailed to become the most far-flung language family of the pre-modern world — Madagascar to Easter Island, Hawaiʻi to New Zealand, over a thousand languages. Nine of the family's ten primary branches never left Taiwan: the smoking gun of its homeland.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-semitic", "name": "Proto-Semitic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 4th millennium BCE", "displayYear": "c. 3500 BCE", "sortYear": -3400, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Homeland debated — Levant or Arabia (or northeast Africa)", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": "Semitic", "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The unwritten ancestor of Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic. Its reconstructed triconsonantal roots — meaning carried by consonant skeletons like k-t-b 'write' — still structure the speech of nearly half a billion people five thousand years later.", "datingNote": null }, { "id": "proto-indo-european", "name": "Proto-Indo-European", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — spoken c. 4500–2500 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 3500 BCE", "sortYear": -3500, "region": "Europe", "place": "Pontic–Caspian steppe (majority view)", "family": "Indo-European", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The most famous language never written: ancestor of English, Spanish, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Greek — the native speech of nearly half of humanity today. Reconstructed word by word over two centuries of scholarship, from *wódr̥ (water) to fragments of poetry: 'imperishable fame'.", "datingNote": "The steppe homeland is the majority view, supported by recent ancient-DNA studies, but an Anatolian-farmer hypothesis and hybrid models are still argued. No Proto-Indo-European text exists or ever will." }, { "id": "proto-pama-nyungan", "name": "Proto-Pama-Nyungan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 4000 BCE (debated)", "displayYear": "c. 4000 BCE", "sortYear": -4000, "region": "Oceania & Australia", "place": "Likely Gulf of Carpentaria region, Australia", "family": "Pama–Nyungan", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Ancestor of ~300 languages covering ninety percent of Australia — yet dating only to the mid-Holocene, on a continent inhabited for 50,000+ years. How one family spread so far, so recently, without farming or conquest, is one of historical linguistics' deepest puzzles.", "datingNote": "Both the dating and the mechanism of the expansion are actively debated; Australia's linguistic deep time vastly exceeds anything reconstruction can reach." }, { "id": "proto-sino-tibetan", "name": "Proto-Sino-Tibetan", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Reconstructed — c. 5000 BCE (debated)", "displayYear": "c. 5000 BCE", "sortYear": -4800, "region": "East Asia", "place": "Likely upper Yellow River basin, northern China", "family": "Sino-Tibetan", "branch": null, "script": "None — reconstructed", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The root of the world's second-largest language family: Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and hundreds of Himalayan languages, together ~1.4 billion speakers. Recent phylogenetic studies tie its origin to millet farmers of the Yellow River valley around seven millennia ago.", "datingNote": "Competing analyses place the breakup anywhere from c. 7200 to 4000 BCE; the family's internal branching is still being mapped." }, { "id": "proto-niger-congo", "name": "Proto-Niger–Congo", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Hypothesized — c. 6th millennium BCE or earlier", "displayYear": "c. 6000 BCE", "sortYear": -5500, "region": "Africa", "place": "West Africa — Sahel/savanna belt", "family": "Niger–Congo", "branch": null, "script": "None — hypothesized", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "If valid, the ancestor of Earth's largest language family by count — over 1,500 languages, from Wolof to Yoruba to all of Bantu. So deep in time that even proving the family's unity strains the comparative method to its limits.", "datingNote": "Niger–Congo's coherence as a single family is itself debated: it may be several families sharing ancient contact. At this time depth, reconstruction fades into educated conjecture." }, { "id": "proto-afroasiatic", "name": "Proto-Afroasiatic", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Hypothesized — c. 10,000–8,000 BCE", "displayYear": "c. 10,000 BCE", "sortYear": -9000, "region": "Africa", "place": "Homeland fiercely debated — northeast Africa or the Levant", "family": "Afroasiatic", "branch": null, "script": "None — hypothesized", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "Possibly the oldest language ancestor that linguistics can still faintly discern — parent of Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, Hausa, Somali, and Oromo. If the early dates are right, people were speaking Proto-Afroasiatic before anyone on Earth farmed, and twice as long ago as any writing.", "datingNote": "Everything here is contested: dates range over four millennia, and the homeland debate (Africa vs. Levant) is unresolved. This is the edge of what comparative linguistics can see." }, { "id": "nostratic-hypothesis", "name": "Nostratic (hypothesis)", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "Hypothesized — c. 13,000 BCE; not generally accepted", "displayYear": "c. 13,000 BCE", "sortYear": -12000, "region": "West Asia & Middle East", "place": "Hypothetical — southwest Asia", "family": "Proposed macrofamily", "branch": null, "script": "None — hypothesized", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "reconstructed", "evidence": "reconstructed", "blurb": "The boldest reconstruction ever attempted: a proposed common ancestor of Indo-European, Uralic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, and more, placed around the end of the Ice Age. Most linguists judge it beyond the comparative method's reach — included here to mark where reconstruction ends and hope begins.", "datingNote": "Nostratic is a minority hypothesis, not accepted science. At 15,000 years, chance resemblance and borrowing overwhelm genuine signal — this is the method's event horizon." }, { "id": "the-first-languages", "name": "The First Languages", "endonym": null, "timeLabel": "c. 100,000+ years ago — unknowable", "displayYear": "≥ 100,000 BP", "sortYear": -100000, "region": "Africa", "place": "Africa — and wherever humans walked", "family": "Unknown", "branch": null, "script": "None — writing lay tens of millennia in the future", "scriptGroup": "Unwritten / oral only", "status": "unknowable", "evidence": "spoken", "blurb": "Anatomy, genetics, and archaeology agree that fully modern language is ancient — likely older than the 100,000-year-old shell beads and ochre engravings that hint at symbolic minds, conceivably as old as Homo sapiens itself, perhaps 300,000 years. Every word ever written descends from speech in this darkness. The first language will never be known: sound leaves no fossils.", "datingNote": "Estimates for the origin of language span 50,000 to over one million years, and whether Neanderthals spoke remains debated. This entry marks not a language, but the horizon beyond which all evidence ends." } ] }