Language refers to a system of communication consisting of a set of small parts and a set of rules that decide the ways in which these parts can be combined to produce messages that have meaning. They can be divided into spoken and written and have existed since the ancient times. In this article, I shall briefly give an overview of the evolvement of these 2 forms of languages in some of the ancient civilizations. Are they still in use today?

The Sumerian language is the oldest written language that has ever existed, which developed around 3100 BC in southern Mesopotamia and flourished during the 3rd millennium BC. The first Sumerian literary texts were written in around 2600 B.C., which included several hymns and proverbs. About 2000 BC, the language of Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) replaced the Sumerian language as a spoken language, but the Sumerian language was still used in writing, almost to the end of the life of the Akkadian language, which was around the beginning of the Christian era.

In ancient Mesoamerica, the Mayas spoke their own forms of Maya language which were rather different in various parts of Mesoamerica. The chart below shows the diversity of the Mayan language in the different regions of Mesoamerica as well as during the different eras of the Mayan civilization.

The Ancient Egyptians too had their own form of language called Egyptian. Egyptian has been divided into five periods. The first, Old Egyptian, was spoken from before 3000 BC until about 2200 BC. Next, Middle Egyptian, was in use from about 2200 BC to about 1300 BC and regarded as the classical Egyptian literary language. It was mainly written, not spoken. By the time of the New Kingdom (1550 BC-1070 BC), many changes had been made to the Egyptian language in terms of grammar and phonetics, to become a new form of language called the Late Egyptian. In about 700 BC, demotic Egyptian, ("popular Egyptian"), which was written with a unique script called demotic script, became the accepted literary language. The last phase of the Egyptian language was the Coptic language, introduced in A.D.300.

The ancient Chinese used a language that is known even up to today. The written language used characters that stood for things or ideas and so, unlike groups of letters, they cannot and need never be sounded. As a result, the Chinese language could be read and understood by people all over the country despite gradual changes in pronunciation, the evolvement of regional and local dialects, and the modification of the characters. The following shows the transformation that the Chinese language has undergone from pictographs to the Chinese characters that we know of today.

Today, there are about 4000 languages spoken all over the world, though only about a hundred of them are widely spoken. Some of the ancient languages such as Sumerian and Egyptian no longer exist. The official language of Egypt today is Arabic, though there are many dialects of the language. As most all of us probably know, English, a language which originated in England, is the most widespread language today, spoken by people all over the globe in countries such as the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and even in various parts of Asia. Mandarin Chinese on the other hand, is a language that is spoken by the most number of people. In my country Singapore, the 4 main languages spoken are English, Mandarin, Hindi and Malay. What about yours?