1137: How Old Can a Language Be and Still Be Known?

Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE) was not written down, and its immediate descendants were not written down either, but much of the vocabulary and syntax can be reconstructed by looking to how modern languages—and even some dead ones—appear today. Using these tools, linguists estimate that PIE was spoken 6,000 years ago, but certainly there were people around before then who would have had to speak other languages. The thing is, even looking to other language-families people don't know what they spoke, and there seems to be a finite amount of time after which it is no longer possible to reconstruct even a proto language. For the Mayan language family it's about 4,200 years, for Austronesian its 6,000, but the longest of any is Afro-Asiatic—including Hebrew, Arabic, Ge'ez, and Aramaic—at more than 9,000 years. Still, this trend, including many more language families, indicates that there is a fairly standard rate at which languages change to the point that they are no longer intelligible. Very few languages can be deciphered after as little as a few hundred year anyway, consider looking at Middle English today, though a mere handful exist, such as Greek, which reportedly still allows people to get the gist of Ancient Greek. If you are interested in learning more about reconstruction of dead languages, and the rate of language-change, comment. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.