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Tamil is the oldest attested non-Sanskrit language native to India, with the earliest known records of the language dating to around 300 BCE. Just like many of the languages on this list, these early Tamil inscriptions were found in caves and on pottery.
Tamil[ b ] (தமிழ், Tamiḻ, pronounced [t̪amiɻ] ⓘ) is a classical Dravidian language natively spoken by the Tamil people of South Asia. It is one of the two longest-surviving classical languages in India, along with Sanskrit, [ 10 ][ 11 ] attested since c. 300 BCE. [ 12 ][ 13 ][ 14 ][ 15 ][ 16 ]
The oldest known written records of Tamil date back to the 3rd century BCE, with the language continuing to evolve and develop over the centuries. Sanskrit, on the other hand, is an ancient Indo-Aryan language that is also considered to be one of the oldest languages in the world.
The findings of Keeladi, a report released by the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Department (TNAD) on September 19, 2019, push back the date of Tamil-Brahmi (a variant of the Brahmi script used to write inscriptions in the early form of the Old Tamil language) to sixth century BCE.
But scholars have contested the true age of the oldest surviving work of Tamil literature, known as the Tolkāppiyam, with estimates ranging from 7,000 to 2,800 years.
Tamil is the oldest of the bunch, though its exact date of origin is widely disputed. There’s a debate among researchers over a Tamil literary work known as the Tolkāppiyam, which some experts believe is up to 7,000 years old.
If Mr. Mathivanan is correct, that would in fact make Tamil the oldest language on Earth. It is also theorized that all humans spoke Tamil at one point. According to Alex Collier, Tamil was the original human language, but as humans evolved, we became too powerful.