Mohammed, the influence a language has on its neighbors is an indication of political, cultural and economic factors, not of the age of the language.

As I tried to explain, all languages of the Afroasiatic macrofamily are equally ancient, since they gradually branched off from their common protolanguage while evolving into their present forms. This may be said of all languages in the world, except for recent inventions like Esperanto or sign language. Some languages are more innovative, having changed more rapidly than the more conservative languages, but all are constantly changing. There is no "oldest" or "first spoken language," since the capacity for language evolved gradually, with its origins in our pre-human ancestors. The language or languages spoken by the earliest people that were very much like us, that is, the most ancient modern Homo sapiens, are far older than any language that we can know through written texts or reconstructions based on the comparison of known languages.

The concept of language is a cultural construct. A language may be defined as a speech variety with a high degree of internal intelligibility and a low degree of intelligibility with other varieties. Frontiers between related languages tend to be blurry. Whether or not two varieties are considered as belonging to the same language depends on what percentage of intelligibility we require in our definition of "language." World languages may be seen as a continuous network of speech varieties that change gradually through space and time. Migration and conquest produce discontinuities in this network; thus comparative linguistics can help us understand prehistoric migration patterns.

Linguistics, together with other branches of anthropology (bioanthropology, ethnography, archaeology, ethnohistory, etc.) can help us attain a deeper understanding of ourselves as a species.

Hi Mohammad. I dont know. And does it matter? The construction of rankings to tell which is the largest, the most important or the most ancient language is crossed by a colonialist ideology. The Europeans did this for a long time and even today there is a dispute as to who left most colonial heritage.

This ideological discourse of the best language can also currently be seen in the discourse of the Brazilian government for the expansion of the Portuguese language abroad.

Dear Mohammed:

I think the most probable scenario, considering available evidence from a scientific point of view, is that all languages descend from a universal protolanguage spoken by early modern Homo sapiens in Africa, the ancestors of all people living today, according to comparative genetic studies. Since languages change and branch through time and space, all speech varieties are thus equally ancient, having evolved gradually from this very ancient (ca. 300,000 years) ancestral human language. Related languages can be compared to determine ancestral protolanguages, but when you go back more than 10,000 years or so, the similarities are impossible or very difficult to perceive.

Dear all, thanks a lot for all your valuable comments. I raised this questions because Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, particularly in (vocabulary). Arabic is a major source of vocabulary for many languages as diverse as (Berber, Kurdish, Amharic, Tigrinya, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi, Catalan, Sindhi, Tagalog, Turkish,Spanish, Hindi, Swahili, Somali, Malay, and Indonesian), as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Even English, which is the most widely spoken language nowadays, contains many words derived from Arabic.

From the map you sketch, and considering medieval and modern political geography and history, it looks like the wide influence of Arabic in these regions was due to it being a high prestige language, associated with political and religious authority, science, philosophy, and the arts.

Dear Mohammed,

That's a very a hard question. In order to answer it one has to spend a whole life career as a philologist. To my mind the best strategy is to follow one's logic and presume the accuracy of historical accounts. Let's see...If Arabic is the oldest language spoken then ancient Hebrew should be older since Arabs are descendants of Ismail. And if Hebrew is older then Arabic then ancient Egyptian should be older since Israelis left Egypt for the promised land. But what was the language of the people who lived there before the Israelis? In other words Arabic and Hebrew are very old but there must be some other languages older..

True Arabic, influenced many languages even Latin...But let us see-was Arabic was also influenced.

Let us take the holy Koran for example-there are over 200 foreign words..,Examples: al injil borrowed from l(Latin ēvangelium, )  iysa ( jesus)  borrowed from greek Ἰησοῦς (Iēsous) and even Samad is borrowed from Hebrew...Mishka't is from ethypopian etc..The idea is that  all languages influence each other and consequently there is no pure language from a linguistic point of view,,,

Dear all, thanks for your comments and valuable information..

Dear Dr. Mohammad Hamad Al-khresheh,

It is difficult to say yes, Arabic was the first spoken language but it could be.

I think I should expand on my comment of October 17.

The comparative study of languages shows us that related languages branched from earlier protolanguages.

Arabic is related to other languages of the Semitic family, such as Amharic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, and Aramaic. Thus the Proto-Semitic language, ancestral to all languages in the Semitic family and spoken sometime around the fourth millennium B. C., is older than Arabic.

The Semitic family, in turn, is related to other families of the macrofamily called Afroasiatic, including hundreds of languages spoken today in northern Africa and the Middle East. The Proto-Afroasiatic language is more ancient than Proto-Semitic, and was spoken at some time between the eighth and the sixteenth millennia B. C., after which it began to branch off into the protolanguages of each of its constituent families, including Semitic.

Before Proto-Afroasiatic there were earlier languages, since modern Homo sapiens goes back to around 300,000 B. C., and it is probable that even earlier forms of our species possessed language skills comparable to ours. As I wrote earlier, when you go back further than around ten millennia, linguistic correspondences become very hard to perceive, if not impossible, so we tend to lose the trail, like tracking deer in a snowfall.

Thus all languages of the Afroasiatic macrofamily are equally ancient, as are those pertaining to other macrofamilies spoken throughout the world.

See these Wikipedia pages for an overview and references on the Semitic family and the Afroasiatic macrofamily:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages#Origins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages

Dear Afaq and David,

Many languages have been influenced by Arabic. Therefore, if it is not the first spoken language, it might be one of the oldest languages in the world. Thank you very much for your contributions.

Mohammed, the influence a language has on its neighbors is an indication of political, cultural and economic factors, not of the age of the language.

As I tried to explain, all languages of the Afroasiatic macrofamily are equally ancient, since they gradually branched off from their common protolanguage while evolving into their present forms. This may be said of all languages in the world, except for recent inventions like Esperanto or sign language. Some languages are more innovative, having changed more rapidly than the more conservative languages, but all are constantly changing. There is no "oldest" or "first spoken language," since the capacity for language evolved gradually, with its origins in our pre-human ancestors. The language or languages spoken by the earliest people that were very much like us, that is, the most ancient modern Homo sapiens, are far older than any language that we can know through written texts or reconstructions based on the comparison of known languages.

The concept of language is a cultural construct. A language may be defined as a speech variety with a high degree of internal intelligibility and a low degree of intelligibility with other varieties. Frontiers between related languages tend to be blurry. Whether or not two varieties are considered as belonging to the same language depends on what percentage of intelligibility we require in our definition of "language." World languages may be seen as a continuous network of speech varieties that change gradually through space and time. Migration and conquest produce discontinuities in this network; thus comparative linguistics can help us understand prehistoric migration patterns.

Linguistics, together with other branches of anthropology (bioanthropology, ethnography, archaeology, ethnohistory, etc.) can help us attain a deeper understanding of ourselves as a species.

Well-said dear David,

Thanks a lot for this interesting answer.

Here is a good vídeo talking about this.

Kinds Regards,

Marcelo Negri

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoVGNYwrtn0

-Sigh-

Dear Dr. Mohammad Hamad Al-khresheh,

I am a bit change my opinion and can say - "Language of signs" was probably the first language.

Dear Afaq,

Thanks for your comments. I would like to add that languages of signs are a bit different from spoken languages.

According to the press service of choice Entekhab.ir, after analyzing more than 50 languages, Quentin Atynksvn doctor finds evidence that the origin of all languages into a single language is on.We have strong evidence that the first modern humans evolved in Africa about 200 to 150 thousand years ago, and there

About 70 thousand years ago, early humans began to migrate to different continents, and eventually spread throughout the world.

Most scientists theory "out of Africa" agree, but they began to talk about what our ancestors when they are less reliable."Doctor Atynksvn" from the University of Auckland, with strong evidence proves that all languages have been pre-history of an African language.

According to the press service of choice Entekhab.ir, the number of "voices" is radically different from one language to another. For example, in English, about 46 "Ava", but fewer than 15 languages in South Africa, "Ava" are.

The scientist says that these differences reflect migration patterns that our ancestors left Africa about 70 thousand years ago, is.

Languages as they are passed from generation to generation Ktd change. Scientists have found that every language in the world in a language that is spoken by our ancestors in Africa, is on.

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

"What Was The First Language Ever Spoken?

What is the first human language? What is the oldest known spoken language people ever used? Is it a live language or it is a long-lost one?

What is the first human language? What is the oldest known spoken language people ever used? Is it a live language we can see somewhere in the world, or it is a long-lost one?

There are so many possible answers to the question of ‘the first language’. Some find answers in the history books, other in research done by linguistics and few people look to the holy books for a possible solution. It makes sense to believe that a form of non-verbal language (body language) came before any known verbal language, but then again, if your search for truth in the holy books, some religions indicate that the world was created by an act of a spoken word, so who known what language was the first to be ever spoken here. Whatever you believe to be true, eventually humans found the spoken word to be the most effective form of communication.

What do you think, was there a ‘first language’, or communication has evolved in a slow process? Since we do not know what was the first language spoken, you guess is good as ours. What was the first language ever spoken? Akkadian? Hebrew? Arabic? Araméen? Chinese? Tamil? English? Greek? Japanese? Body Language? Sign Language? … What language came first, Arabic, Greek or Hebrew? What language did the ancient Egyptians speak? What languages are in the bible? ‎50,000 years ago, what languages were in use? …

Update: we have realized that people are answering based on their religion. What do you think, should we find the answer in the holy books, or in the science research?" 

 Please, refer to the website link...

http://www.mydaily.news/2017/03/what-was-the-first-language-ever-spoken/

Look at Nostratic theory. It suggests strongly that many language Families that surround the Red Sea came out of a large 'pulse' out of Africa at the likely time-frame of 70,000 years ago, and that they share a theoretical ancestral language from that time-frame. Given that time-depth, Arabic is a fairly derived and recent language, only slightly older than Latin.