What’s the world’s oldest language? | Hacker News Reader

What’s the world’s oldest language?

scientificamerican.com

49 pointsLinuxBender87 comments

This question keeps cropping up, and whenever it does, people claim it was their language. The question needs to be precisely framed.

Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old.

Oldest still spoken language in a particular area? It's easier to answer this for islands or archipelagos, e.g. Great Britain: Welsh. New Zealand: Maori. Japan: Ainu (but maybe not for much longer).

Oldest written language? Sumerian (extinct) or Egyptian (not extinct, despite what the article states).

Oldest written language still in use? Coptic, a direct descendant of Egyptian used as a liturgical language in the Coptic Church, but not spoken as a vernacular for centuries.

Oldest written language still spoken? Hebrew (originally Canaanite), in continuous use but not as a vernacular for about 2000 years.

Oldest written language continuously spoken: Greek, but it wasn't continuously written. (There was a gap between Linear B and alphabetic script.)

Oldest continuously spoken and written language: Chinese.

What about languages we can only speculate about? E.g: the several languages of the Khoe-Sān people in South Africa.

It is generally assumed that their language is, phonetically, the most "different" in the world and therefore we can suppose that it was one of the first to derive from the hypothetical "proto-language".

Blanking on a source right now, but I recall reading about a study on the 'oldness' of languages and found that the unique sort of phonetics in !Kung and other Khoe or San languages appeared to reduce over time, and simpler hard consonants would emerge in their place - implying that they are indeed some of the oldest languages still around.

Interstingly, there are a number of words from these languages that are still widely used in South African slang: Dagga for Marijuana, Eina for "Ouch!", Gogga for Bug or Insect, and Kerrie for Stick, usually used as the neologism Knobkerrie. Very possibly some of the oldest slang in the world!

You could arguably claim that Hebrew never ceased to be a spoken language, although it was not a vernacular.

Hebrew never ceased to be used in liturgy and in religious studies - the same situation also holds true for Coptic, so the oldest written language still spoken (in religious capacity only) is Coptic.

But Hebrew was also used as a lingua franca between different Jewish communities all over the world. This was not a minor role, and it had quite an economic impact on forming long-range trade networks across Jewish communities.

Now there are more things people might love to argue about, such as when we can really define a script as "writing" and how do we deal with undeciphered scripts. So one can try to discredit Proto-Canaanite inscriptions like Wadi el-Hol or claim that ancient Chinese pottery symbols that are precursor to Oracle bone script are actually related. The evidence seems to be stronger on the Hebrew side, but it's very easy to derail this kind of argument just to score national pride points.

I thought that Chinese is a group of languages, so when you mention it do you mean Mandarin and Cantonese both?

Yes, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, etc., as they're all derived from Old Chinese and share its script.

At the point of the oldest Chinese writing, people spoke Old Chinese. But it's safe to assume old Chinese had dialects as well, and maybe some of them were quite mutually unintelligible enough to be considered different languages.

> Oldest spoken language in the world? All equally old.

That doesn’t seem possible. Surely some spoken languages are older then others.

Languages aren't concrete things. They are historical chains of interacting cause and effect where a person learns to speak from a community then joins the community and in so doing propagates the language to others. Asking about the "age" of a language doesn't really make any sense, except for constructed languages like Esperanto, and even those aren't really denovo because they inevitably are created by people who already spoke another language.

A better question is what language has the longest period of mutual comprehensibility, e.g. if you took a speaker from time A to time B. As an English speaker, I could talk to Shakespeare with some mild accommodations, but I would have a lot of trouble talking to Chaucer.

For written languages, the period of mutual comprehensibility can end up being thousands of years long because people in later generations are trained on the earlier texts, but for spoken languages, things tend to break up after a few hundred years. The best chance for a spoken language to maintain intelligibility is to have some kind of religious community that insists on preserving the old dialect, like Sanskrit (where there is a well preserved canon of pronunciation), Classical Arabic (Quran recitation), Hebrew, Latin, etc.

Most languages have naturally evolved as far back as we can track them through history, and beyond that we just don't know. As far as we know, most languages could just go back to one Ur-Tongue (sometimes called Proto-World).

But some spoken languages are newer and we can prove that. The youngest language in the world is arguably the Nicaraguan Sign Language[1], from the early 1980s. The only possible progenitors are home sign systems the kids who developed it used at home, which were not full languages and were themselves quite new, so it's got a pretty strong claim.

Beyond that you've got pidgins, creoles and mixed languages which develop by combining two or more languages. You can argue whether or not their entirely new, since they generally borrow vocabulary from one language and grammar from the another, or just mix several languages more freely together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language. Since spoken language significantly predates written language, we’ll never know when the former originated.

It’s just practical to say they’re all equally old to avoid any cultural egotism that inevitably creeps in.

It's not cultural egotism to say for example, that Hebrew is older than English. Being old doesn't confer extra prestige on a language.

The problem is in deciding whether a language spoken 1000 years ago is still the same language as today. I'm not enough of a linguist to know the correct answer to this.

English and Hebrew are equally old. Just like humans and chimps are.

There are species with less "evolution" than others.

You are making a semantic argument that virtually no linguists accept. We get your point, we just don't think it makes sense for how we define languages.

I'm no linguist, but I do study it as a hobby. As far as I'm aware, linguists are not generally in the business of making ridiculous claims like "this language is older than another." The concept of "age" for a language for something as fluid as language is fundamentally flawed.

> English and Hebrew are equally old.

If you had a time machine could you bring me an English speaker from the year 1 CE?

In 1CE, people in Palestine mostly spoke Aramaic, and Hebrew was a religious language rapidly declining in vernacular use. :-)

If I offered 100 pieces of gold I bet I could find at least one Hebrew speaker in Judaea in the year 1.

Would I find an English speaker if I then popped over to Britannia and offered gold? Or would they say "What the fuck is English?"

Hebrew as it's spoken today in Israel, or ancient Hebrew? There's a lot of intelligibility between the two, but it's mostly in the written form. In ancient Judea you'd be more likely to find a speaker of dialect that'd entirely dead today.

As far as English goes, obviously you wouldn't find any English speakers in ancient Britain, but you could find Saxons that spoke a language that English is descended from. There won't be much intelligibility, if any at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was equally unintelligible as ancient spoken Hebrew.

> but you could find Saxons that spoke a language that English is descended from.

Not in britain you wouldn't, the saxons colonised britain in the 700-800AD range. Britons speaking Brythonic is what you'd find, probably not common Brythonic though, too early for that.

Yes, you are correct the Saxons would be in ancient Saxony, not Britain.

So you concede that Hebrew existed. Well English didn’t and that’s the point.

> Without written language, no record can exist of the spoken language.

It's possible to go back further, at least if there are multiple descendants. We have a reasonably good understanding of spoken Proto-Germanic based on literature in Gothic, Old English, and Old Norse. We can even go back further to Proto-Indo-European as we have records in Hittite, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.

OK, excluding constructed languages such as Esperanto.

“All spoken languages are equally old” but then in the next point: Welsh is older than English. You must have miscommunicated here? Obviously all spoken languages are not “equally old”…

Older = spoken earlier. A direct ancestor of Welsh was spoken earlier than a direct ancestor of English in Great Britain, but as both languages are direct descendants of Proto-Indo-European, they are equally old somewhere.

But there's an added wrinkle of which language (either spoken or written) stays mutually intelligible with the current variant for the furthest amount of time back. And tons of languages exist that are Creoles and formed from pidgins and essentially came into existence during the recent colonial era. And events like the massive flood of French vocab into English create some discontinuities in intelligibility over time. Evolution of any sort tends to not be a smooth linear process

are humans older than chimps?

no, we share a common ancestor.

Have chimps been in x country for longer than humans? maybe

not the same question

References?

Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct

Umm, what? Coptic is a (barely) living Egyptian. It is close enough for us to have deciphered hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic, at the old, middle, and late stages. Yes the Greek on the Rosetta stone helped but Coptic sealed the deal, particularly with transliteration. Thus I would say using the term “Egyptian” to refer to any particular language with obvious stages and then saying it’s dead when you have a stage still spoken is absurd, and does a great disservice to linguistic communities that need help. I expect better from a publication as “woke” as Scientific American. Copts and their language may not be thriving nor reviving but news of the death of the Egyptian language is a bit exaggerated.

This is why “oldest language” is silly.

Is Old English the same language as Modern English? They are definitely not mutually intelligible. If we can accept them as being the “same” language then why not English and Proto-Indo-European? It’s not like people woke up one day and started speaking a different language. It’s a continuous evolution.

The oldest languages that are still intelligible such that you could go back in time and be sure to be understood are surely the liturgical languages like Arabic and Latin that have been carefully preserved over thousands of years. Without this system of active remembrance, languages naturally become unintelligible with their prior versions.

I think a better and more interesting question would, perhaps, be “What is the most conservative language as supported by written and spoken evidence (the variations of ancient greek dialects tracking with orthographic differences shows that it can be done). And Anglo-saxon is not the same as modern English to any degree. 1066 and the great vowel shift saw to that. A great book on the history, and conservative nature of Egyptian is “The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study” by James Allen. If you really want to get into the weeds “Ancient Egyptian Phonology” by the same author. The latter in particular points out the extreme similarities to more rural Coptic dialects and Egyptian as found in the Heqanakht papyri.

It's interesting to think that the amount of written and spoken words that will be preserved for future generations is higher than ever. Will the future need to understand all these internet texts, podcasts and videos contribute to the ossification of languages?

> I expect better from a publication as “woke” as Scientific American.

This strikes me as a prime example of "woke" having lost all meaning. What would it mean here? Having an orientation towards truth? Giving a shit about minorities?

Saying racism is without scientific merit, that trans people shouldn't kill themselves, and/or not being overtly fascist.

you are being deliberately hyperbolic

Plus, wasn't Arabic based on Aramaic, which is still spoken today?

No, Aramaic falls somewhere in between the two. Hebrew is closer to Aramaic since it has borrowed its higher register (similar to how Latin influenced European languages)

Both Hebrew and Aramaic belong to the Northwest Semitic languages[1] family

Furthermore, there is no single attested Arabic language in the same manner as Hebrew, which is one of the Canaanite dialects

There are several proto-Arabic languages[2], but some of the northern ones are likely speculative. While there is evidence of the Ancient North Arabian[3] script, the actual language(s) it represents remain unattested

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Semitic_languages

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Arabic_language

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_North_Arabian

Not really, they are not even on the same sub-branch of Semitic languages. Aramaic is closer to Hebrew.

Aramaic is still spoken by Assyrians and IIRC some other Christian groups in the region though.

Coptic is as dead as Latin. No one speaks it as a native language.

it has a steady liturgical use and children are raised to understand it in church, along with small spoken revival groups here in the states so, while not exactly living, I would say it’s in a far better state in its community than Latin post vatican 2. But note, I never said it was alive. Just that it’s not as dead as, say, Sumerian (in fact it’s about as alive amongst the coptic community I know as Sumerian was at the time Akkadian was spoken, as a language of identity and education)

That is why I compared it to Latin. It sees steady liturgical use, and in some pockets, children are still raised to understand it in Church, along with spoken revival groups. That is to say, Latin is dead.

I would say Coptic and Latin are not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison, primarily because today coptic is attached to a specific ethnic identity and the attempts at community revival that come with that. Of course one might argue that there are Latin revival groups too but equating organised families and expat communities that function like the Copts (or similar groups like the Mandaeans) with, say, internet organised neo-pagans that have little continuity or an organisation like the Catholic Church that solely uses Latin for official documents and discourages its use is, at best, a comparison that lacks any sort of diachronic subtlety.

As a Copt who speaks but doesn't understand very much of what I say, my father can speak it, as does anyone who has a liturgical inclination. I can always go learn more of it, and it will likely remain as alive as it currently is for the foreseeable future. It's impossible to be devout without speaking it, it's impossible to connect to our identity without seeking to be devout.

Just supporting what you're saying.

Coptic is used actively. It remains important. It is spoken by its community, it is very religiously and culturally significant. Sanskrit may have been a better analogy than Latin. And I thank you for your perspective. I was only debating a fairly technical linguistic point.

A living language is a language that is used to teach children how to peel vegetables, that people shout when they stub their toe, and a language lovers whisper together. If none of that is going on, if it is used only in some contexts, by people who start learning it after they already know another language (their native language), then it is probably a dead language.

Perhaps "dead" sounds pejorative, it is meant to be descriptive. Does that intense degree of language use occur? If no one speaks a language as their first, primary language, then the language is generally considered "dead" - even if hundreds of thousands of people use it every day. Another way of looking at it: if Coptic is still used in a thousand years, would it be recognizable? Or would it be like how Latin and Sanskrit are nearly unchanged, since they were last living languages? Living languages evolve.

Classical Latin is to Italian as Middle Egyptian is to Coptic. If the former pair are distinct languages, so are the latter. Yes, knowledge of Coptic is what unlocked the Rosetta Stone. But the differences are substantial. Old Egyptian (even if we knew the vowels) and revival Bohairic would be nowhere near mutually intelligible.

Very disappointing article, and a reminder to me that, when the headline is a question, the article rarely contains the answer.

It's as though the author went down a rabbit hole of her own curiosity for a couple hours, came up with next to nothing, but had to justify the time spent.

> It's as though the author went down a rabbit hole of her own curiosity for a couple hours, came up with next to nothing, but had to justify the time spent.

Authors have daily standups too?

Yes I was thinking a better title would be, "It is difficult to determine the oldest language"

Well, the question is in reality either unanswerable (we don't know - and may never know - how many and when the first proto-language(s) emerged) or meaningless (all live natural languages go back as far as we can reconstruct or attest to).

I have started to plan some earth mounds. I keep walking over the same ground contemplating the optimal setting. Once I figured that out it occurred to me that it would be fun to make them 3 sizes small, medium, and large.

The idea has evolved to the point where I'm now estimating quantity of stones and relative size based on seating capacity of the mound.

I won't it even get in to site the entrances towards the east...

My point, I think is that a simple tweaks to earth mound can evolve a complex language by using similar shaped river stones at different scales.

The final result of the first phase will 7 mounds of 3 sizes and one large elevated platform. I realized doing planing the easiest way to communicate my idea to landscapers was to find a stone of each size to use a reference. I could then describe how many of which type go where. before covering with earth.

Once they are done we start to mark celestial events with special stones from far away places to mark the significance...

I felt the author was justified in failing to yield an answer by posing the title in the form of a question. You were not going to get an answer, you were going to explore a question.

An article that gives an answer would have said "<insert language> Is The World's Oldest Language."

My suspicion is that we have been clickbait-trained to expect answers when the title is a question. I prefer this structure.

Speaking as a former journalist, I would say:

It's the job of reporters to do more than explore a question. Their job is to surface new and useful information for readers, and then prioritize it. And the job of the headline is to telegraph to readers what that information may be, reflecting their priorities.

It is a sign of a failed process of reporting if one can do no more than explore a question, and present a collection of dead ends.

If the reporter can't name the oldest language, then she might write a piece focused on why it's so hard to determine which language is oldest.

Or she might tell the story of how nationalism drives scholars of Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil to stake the claims they do. There are probably several great stories there.

That is, part of the process of reporting is framing a question that can be answered in a way that allows her to present new and relevant information.

The reporter of this piece, and her editors, did not meet that standard.

There are so many fascinating things about languages. Here are a couple:

- Toss people together who don't really have a common language, and they quickly evolve a pidgin, which is a very simplified kind of language that lets them communicate. Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language. This has happened repeatedly over history, often through things like conquering or enslaving other groups or nations.

- Isolate people, and they quickly develop their own dialect. Continue the isolation, and the dialect will diverge into a separate language. Dutch is an evolved German dialect. On the other end of Germany, Swiss German is much the same, but isn't quite regarded as its own language.

As another comment says: it really makes no sense to suppose there was one, unique, proto-language. Evolution is a gradual process, and the complexity of communication will have evolved just as gradually. Likely, different tribes will have had different communication patterns. Interbreeding, warfare and slavery will have mixed things up occasionally, but there will surely have been many different dialects and languages.

> Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language.

Yes, and full creole languages, ones with relatively little of the grammar of their parent languages, have a number of similarities in their grammar. These similarities persist whatever the parent languages. Different continents, different parent languages, grammatical similarities.

For example, plurals are often formed by reduplication (dog -> dog-dog = dogs), word order is subject-verb-object or subject-object-verb, suffixes follow the morpheme they're attached to. The grammars are extremely regular, almost no exceptions, no complex sound-fusion rules. It's generally thought that creole languages, immediately after formation, are actually simpler than most other languages grammatically. Which may have been like creoles at one point but then picked up a bunch of useless nonsense you just have to memorize. (This view is sometimes challenged, and it must be admitted, it is hard to define and measure complexity in language.)

That is one of those small hints that language may be physiologically innate, or an emergent phenomenon that recreates itself in similar ways each time it is invented by people who need to communicate -- i.e., universal grammar, that ever-so-tempting yet ever-so-unprovable idea that got everyone tangled up last century.

Just as a little correction: Dutch is not an "evolved German dialect". German and Dutch are both West Germanic languages, but so is Scots, Frisian and English. So it would be like saying that German is an evolved English dialect then (though to be fair, Dutch and German are grouped closer to each-other in that family tree usually and have provided a lot of substrate for each-other due to close contact).

Swiss German is not regarded as a its own language by any nation, though from a purely linguistic perspective it could very well be classified as its own language. What is deemed a language vs. a dialect usually comes down to politics. The saying usually goes something like: "A language is just a dialect with an army".

> Swiss German

If we go a few hundred years or so it would’ve been considered a language as much as any other German “dialect”. But somebody decided to pick another dialect to be the “standard German” language.

Same applies to France and Italy. Especially when some northern Italian “dialect” are actually more closely related to “French” and some southern “French” ones to Catalan.

Just like for instance Dutch interestingly enough is closer to Franconian than to Frisian.

I saw a a neat video recently that mapped the spread of language through Germany as a gradient, with each successive wave being understood by their neighbours but people at opposite ends of the spectrum having difficulty. Then national boundaries cut right through that.

https://youtu.be/ilWSllUAM7U?si=t7IFX2QxdIq_jL5d

There are those who believe that English should be considered North Germanic (Scandinavian) rather than West Germanic: https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml?lan...

> Over a couple of generations, the pidgin evolves into a full language

What I read is that children born into a pidgin speaking society will turn it into a full (creole) language, because that's how people work.

So, yes, but it can take a little time.

The two main things is that a language will meet the needs of its speakers, and that people will have at least one native language. You can't prevent either thing across a group.

A new & true pidgin has no native speakers, so no group will depend on it for all of their communication needs, falling back to their native languages when possible/necessary. It will be a native language of the first generation born into its communities. But critically they will also usually be native speakers of another language, the one their parents use at home, and will still be able to fall back to that for some of their communication needs.

So the pidgin will grow and change from the use of the first native speaker cohort, but it can take multiple generations for it to have a base of native speakers who depend on it absolutely. Though in other cases, esp with more than two combined languages, it can happen in one generation.

And as it's happening, it's fuzzy on whether it's a pidgin or a creole. I don't think linguists consider them separate non-overlapping categories, but more like the two modes in a bimodal distribution. Understanding is also complicated by the fact that these emerge relatively rarely, and tend to be in groups & parts of the world, until relatively recently, without a lot of scholarly attention on them.

That sounds right. I appreciate the added detail.

I learned what little I know on this from John McWorther's book "The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language": https://a.co/d/edvzLuB

> Isolate people, and they quickly develop their own dialect.

Are you sure of that? I think the absence of external communication would make a language more conservative.

Yeah, it’s generally the inverse from what they are saying. Isolated groups retain the old form of the language for much longer.

e.g. Romansh or even Basque.

It seems multi-dimensional. Isolation allows for parallel language development, but that development could be conservative relative to the rest of the speakers, or it could be heavily divergent.

Basque is an example where there's an obvious motivation for linguistic conservatism: the maintenance of a language that is "untainted" by the constant and unbalanced contact with French and Spanish speakers. There's a need to preserve a language that would otherwise be consumed and die out.

English is actually a great example, I think, of how isolation can lead to divergence. Compared to other languages in its family (e.g. Dutch and German) it's wildly unintelligible, largely owing to the fact that English was spoken on an island where contact with speakers of other Germanic languages was much less common.

English is a great example of a language with huge influence from other Germanic languages and the French language. It wasn’t isolated in any meaningful sense: there were local Celtic tribes that lived there before Anglo-Saxons, then there was Danelaw, then there was the Norman conquest. Icelandic is a better example.

Sure, maybe not entirely isolated. I just mean that the geographic isolation of being an island means you don't see a dialect continuum between English and other languages the way that you do with say, the various Germanic languages.

Some linguists argued that English is essentially a creole language which would explain this.

> isolated

I would say the opposite. Frisian etc. were much more isolated and therefore developed more conservatively.

> a dialect continuum

You do a bit, e.g. Scots which developed somewhat independently/in parallel to English.

A bit offtopic, but if you are interested in languages, the great courses by John McWhorter are some of the most informative and entertaining resources on the subject that I have come across. He provides a wealth of knowledge on language evolution, both as to how they tend to evolve and how they actually did evolve, and he provides it in a way that makes you sad it's over.

You can find them on Audible, I think some are available with the monthly subscription, but it is definitely worth the money.

What makes them think that there was just one proto-language not several ones that appeared independently from each other?

This is a very good question. It seems quite possible that some human population at some point, may have endured a level of stress and adverse conditions, that proper language transfer to the children did not happen -- something like a mix of surviving adults from different cultures who do not speak the same language.

There are apparent examples of languages being invented, with no clear parent language. [1] When education for the deaf is first introduced, children from many different families are brought together. Most do not have full language - they cannot communicate with language with anyone. Some are part of small clusters, families or small villages where many are deaf. [2] They often do have full languages. These languages are usually untraceable in origin. They're not related to each other, usually.

Pool these kids these together in a school and they will create a full language, a creole [3], in just a few years.

It's unclear, IMO, exactly how to interpret that effect. The children are not completely without language. They're obviously aware of the concept of language, a few of them may even have full languages (even if they can't use it with the other kids) and the teachers are also trying to teach them language, usually American sign if there's nothing local. So it can't be said to be language popping up in a true vacuum. But it is certainly curious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Langu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

The short answer is "because it seems too difficult to have been independently developed." Of course, it was once thought that things like writing or farming were too difficult to have been independently developed, but archaeological evidence has made clear at least 3 (and possibly ~6-ish) independent inventions of the former and at least 9 for the latter.

There are a few more concrete reasons to specifically believe against independent development of language. If you believe that language faculties arise very quickly after evolution of a biological organ to facilitate language, that suggests that the ability to have language is a key part of Homo sapiens and therefore language would have originated only once in the development in Homo sapiens as a species.

There’s no evidence that Homo Sapiens, aside from some interbreeding with other hominids interacted with other hominids who were capable of complex language for that to be possible. And a multiple origin scenario for behaviourally modern humans flies in the face of modern science, archaeology, and palaeontology to such a degree that it would basically require magic.

How so? Early humans moved around and were all over the place, often with no or little contact. I don't see why two groups of humans couldn't have developed (proto)-language independently. There's lots of examples of things independently developing in multiple places.

I think what zirgs meant is that since at least one group of humans developed a language, it makes sense that different groups of humans could also independently develop language.

One (admittedly speculative) reason to believe that all natural spoken languages have a common ancestor derives from the fact that modern humans seem to rapidly develop new languages in the absence of an existing language, as was seen in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language. There is no particularly compelling reason to believe that earlier homo sapiens – who were otherwise anatomically modern – would be any different before they began migrating out of africa. This is especially true given that all human populations do ultimately have both an apparently-innate capacity for language, and their own languages.

If this is the case, then the first language would have probably rapidly spread between the early populations in africa – if, indeed, there were multiple distinct populations at the time – and new (homo sapiens–originated) languages would have only arisen if the chain of speakers were somehow broken and children raised without access to an existing language.

With that being said, there are some cases where something similar has happened. Most obviously are sign languages, which are believed to have had multiple origins, since it is possible for deaf people to be born among non-signing populations. Something similar in the case of spoken languages is the phenomenon of pidgins evolving into creoles mentions elsewhere in the comments, although they still retain at least some aspect of one of their parent languages. The extent to which the latter count as proto-languages is questionable.

I don’t think that we can conclusively say (or even close to that) that other Hominids were incapable of complex (to an extent) language.

That doesn’t seem to make sense. Surely interbreeding with other hominids requires interaction with other hominids?

History shows that many humans of the same species can “interact” without friendly communication, or, for that matter, preserving fully functional languages (Just look at the Minoans, Etruscans, Harappans, Rhetics, and the numerous other peoples who spoke something that we can’t read, or can understand but only with great effort)

This article does a poor job of even identifying candidates, because it narrows its scope to old world history (i.e. european, middle eastern, and asian history).

It ignores for example, Aboriginal Australians whose history and language dates back over 50,000 years. Far preceding the timelines mentioned. Many African cultures and languages are likewise much older than those mentioned in the article.

Asking what is the oldest language is like asking what is the oldest species. The question is meaningless.

I'd like to know what the oldest mutually intelligible language would be.

With each spoken and written language that exists, from how long ago could you find a speaker (or reader) who could meaningfully have a conversation with an average fluent speaker from today.

I specifically say average, because vocabulary registers shift with time - even when fundamentals of the language do not, even an english speaker from after the great vowel shift might have trouble unless the modern speaker was especially well read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Sanskrit Sanskrit is the only one with significant use due ancient religious texts. Sumerian/Egyptian/Akkadian are basically academic reconstructions and modern languages deviate significantly from their ancestors(e.g. proto-Armenian vs modern Armenian).

But it’s impossible to prove the existence of a proto-human language—the hypothetical direct ancestor of every language in the world.

Maybe not in the bulletproof sense, but it seems pretty obvious that since human beings raised without language cannot learn it as adults or even as teenagers, the facility for learning language at a particular age is an evolved trait. That and the fact there's strong evidence neanderthals used language means language is effectively older than our species. All known languages and language groups within the last fifty thousand years, therefore, are just the distant descendants of a language five, ten, or twenty times older. Those "bragging rights" are scientifically irrelevant.

I guess it depends on how we define a language. It’s not inconceivable that different languages might have developed from multiple different proto-languages.

Or that languages were lost and developed again from some semi-verbal communication systems independently.

I have a cuneiform tablet sitting right here on my desk. In English it says:

Never gonna give you up

Never gonna let you down

Never gonna run around and desert you

Never gonna make you cry

Never gonna say goodbye

Perl

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