Although it is true that there are other ways to do it, trying to communicate fluently with other people regardless of the Spanish language or any other language that we handle, leads us to wonder about the first language in the world and how it began to be spoken.
We want to focus on this characteristic of human beings, which is also one of those that distinguishes us from other animal species.
Currently, it is considered that we live with more than 6,000 different languages , some of which have been adopted by entire countries and millions of their citizens, and others that barely survive among a few inhabitants, generally in less urbanized areas.
What is the world’s first language?
Now, when it comes to analyzing the origins of languages as we know them, we can affirm that most scientific theories coincide in the emergence of a protolanguage , a single language that came to dominate the entire planet, although it had little to do. see with the current ones.
This belief, which is part of an even larger hypothesis called monogenesis, “a single origin”, holds that all human beings come from a small group of them and that, therefore, it would not be at all unreasonable to think that we all agree on a language in the past.
In fact, in a certain way the Catholic religion shares this thought, since the Bible alludes to the Tower of Babel , a myth much less demonstrable than the previous one, but which shares the idea that all humans maintain a single language common.
The sacred scriptures explain that God, annoyed by the pride of the builders of the Tower of Babel, decided to punish them by assigning a language to each of them, to confuse them.
The Sumerians, possible authors of the first language
Other historians suggest that, if we stick specifically to the antiquity of languages, the Sumerians have a lot to say about it, because they are responsible for some of the oldest traces that have been obtained from any written language.
The records of Sumerian writing go up to 3,500 years BC, and have been found in Lower Mesopotamia, coinciding, centuries more centuries less, with the first ones found in China.
Other experts consider, unlike the specialists who adhere to the single language, that in reality the various languages were born in each of the communities while they developed new habits, both oral and written.
