Oldest Language in India

An Attempt to Settle the Long-Standing Debate on India’s Linguistic Heritage

The debate over the Indian subcontinent’s oldest language is complex, confusing, and, to make matters worse, politically loaded, with no easy answer. This region boasts of an enormous linguistic diversity, second only to the tiny Polynesian nation of Papua New Guinea. The number of languages spoken here ranges from 400-odd to almost twice as many, depending on who we ask. With extraordinarily touchy speakers. So touchy, an entire nation broke free purely on linguistic grounds less than three generations ago. In India, this touchiness expresses itself in the perpetual high-octane debate over a “national language.” As of this writing, India has none.

A debate on national language is, expectedly, a debate on language primacy. And a debate on language primacy is, just as expectedly, a debate on linguistic vintage. The older the language the more its preeminence. Ultimately, it’s a clash of chauvinism with surprisingly few contenders. Of the several hundred languages spoken in India, only two have their horns locked in this clash—Sanskrit and Tamil. This article hopes to navigate this hotly, at times violently, contested terrain and return an answer backed by as much scholarship as possible.

Definition

The prerequisite to even opening a debate on language antiquity is a logical definition of language itself. Unfortunately, there’s none. Hindi and Urdu are different languages but Bhojpuri is a mere dialect of Hindi. Modern English is a descendant of Old English and yet speakers of the two would barely, if at all, comprehend each other. Clearly, mutual intelligibility doesn’t always dictate terms which makes defining language a tricky affair. Oftentimes, the line between language and dialect is political rather than linguistic.

Just as we cannot tell the exact year Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens, we cannot tell the exact moment, say, Proto-Dravidian evolved into Tamil. And just as we are not the same species as our erectus ancestors despite the ancestry, should we also say Modern Tamil is not the same language as Proto-Dravidian, despite the ancestry? Organic languages, after all, evolve just like us even if on a much smaller scale. Or should we treat them differently because the smaller scale makes it harder to locate the point where the ancestral language ends and its modern descendant starts? The smaller scale means even a slight subjectivity in placing that point would mean a significant swing in the language’s vintage. And subjectivity is integral to an exercise of this nature because that point is in many ways, quite arbitrary. Think ship of Theseus. English is only five hundred years old if we only consider Modern English, but a millennium older if we consider Old English. But the average English speaker of today will struggle as much with Die Zeit as with Beowulf. One definition makes it a very young language, the other makes it older than French. As we can see, definition is what the whole verdict hinges on. Since any alternative is as arbitrary as all others, for the purpose of this conversation we’ll define a language continuous only to the extent the average modern speaker could comprehend, even if with some difficulty. The moment it becomes incomprehensible, we note it as a departure from an earlier language. Thus, for our purposes, Chaucer’s English is English, but Beowulf’s English is not.

Another consideration, and a big one, is the current status of the language. It’s both futile and unfair to pit a language spoken today against one that went extinct centuries ago. Even the debate is over the oldest “continuously spoken” language. But things again get tricky when we consider languages that remain in the purgatory of the liturgy. These are neither alive nor dead. They’re used, but only in liturgical circles. An example is Latin. Or Avestan. Nobody, outside of some linguists and enthusiasts, speaks or even comprehends them. Only the high priests of Christianity understand Latin and only a tiny subset of the global Christian base that attends the Mass in Latin speaks it. Closer home, one such example is Sanskrit. The language is far from dead. But it’s no lingua franca either. Comparing it with Tamil might seem unfair because it’s dying, and also fair because it’s dying, not dead. We’ll go with the latter.

In sum, in our context, a language a) starts at a point beyond which its form becomes unintelligible to the average current speaker, and b) is alive even if not lingua franca, so long it’s in currency anywhere including the liturgy. These will be the guiding caveats for this investigation. We shall start with Tamil, then examine Sanskrit, and then will see if there are other possible candidates that aren’t even in the race. Tamil ought to be the starting point because it’s the language that stakes the most aggressive claim. An endeavor of this kind must eschew all sociopolitical prejudices and blindly follow peer-reviewed scholarship to whatever truth it leads to. Which is what we’ll do.