What is the oldest language still spoken?

Tamil in India.

More questions than definitive answers on this issue…an interesting one.

Google

Hebrew’s come all the way from biblical times.

Gaelic is making a comeback in Ireland. That’s pretty old.

Well, it depends on whether you want a dead language or not :\ otherwise Latin is obviously pretty old, but the oldest is going to be an indigenous language that hasn’t moved anywhere. There’s a really old language in Australia and definitely some around the middle-east, but I couldn’t pinpoint it for you.

I’d say love, but I won’t for fear of sounding cheesy…maybe fear then!?

Languages are constantly changing… so I don’t think there’s any easy answer to this question. For example, the Modern Greek language is directly descended from the Ancient Greek that Socrates spoke, but has changed quite a bit over the centuries. So, is it the “same” language?

I know you specified “spoken,” but in keeping with Breefield’s answer, I might suggest “body language.” People have been smiling and frowning at each other for thousands of years, and a lot of human gestures are surprisingly consistent across cultures.

First answer is correct so far in my research. Can’t be anything like Latin or Gaelic, considering they are both indo-european, and there are language much closer to the original Indo-European on the whole evolutionary tree.

And I could be wrong, but Hebrew was dead, and then was reconstructed into modern day Hebrew.

Classical Hebrew, as used in the Old Testament, has always been studied by Rabbis, biblical scholars, and 123 year olds. Hebrew as spoken in Israel today did evolve in manner similar to demotic Greek, which arose from various forms of classical (Attic, etc. and biblical also) Greek.

Erk. I meant *12-yr-olds.

Classical Hebrew is old but was dead and came back to life in the 20th century.
I think the answer is Greek. It is a scientific fact that modern Greek is a language naturally evolved from the attic dialect of Ancient Greek (the same way Shakespeare’s English evolved to modern English). The average Greek today understands 90% of the New Testament text, written in the 1st century, in the Kini dialect which was the Alexandrian simplification of the attic dialect and the international lingua of that period. The use of Bible texts is the reason Greek survived .

hebrew…even though like 3 people have already said it…maybe two

There is no such thing as an “oldest language.” No language is older than any other. For instance, to say that Latin is older than French, we would need to determine exactly when Latin turned into French. And we can’t. French and Latin are the same language, spoken at different points in time. All (non-creole) languages consist of an unbroken line of speakers going back to a point beyond recorded history.

http://www.linguistlist.org/ask-ling/oldest.html