What is the oldest surviving language?

What is the oldest surviving language?

It is impossible to be sure what the oldest surviving language is. Spoken language could have developed thousands of years before a written language in some cultures so we would have no record of when it was created. As far as we can tell Tamil is the oldest surviving language (By “surviving” I mean still spoken by people and not only used by scholars or scientists like Latin) and it has evolved from Proto-Dravidian. Tamil in its earliest forms has been dated back to between 500BC and 200BC. It originates from an area in India called Tamil Nadu but inscriptions have been found in Egypt, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Tamil has had three different forms. Old Tamil the earliest form of Tamil, middle Tamil which was achieved by the 8^th century and modern Tamil which has been spoken for the last 400 years. Changes between the three forms include the development of a present tense, the addition of more Sanskrit words and the removal of several words. Despite this modern Tamil is still very similar to old Tamil.

Today Tamil is still spoken by about 8 million people in regions of India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Mauritius and in 2001 1863 newspapers were printed in Tamil. I think that qualifies Tamil as a surviving language and the fact that it is  over 2000 years old seems like good enough evidence for it being the oldest.