Curated category
Subject–verb–object languages
- Polish languageThe Book of Henryków contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language. A Cistercian monk named Peter recorded this phrase around 1280…
- Czech languageThe earliest written traces of Czech appear in glosses and short notes from the 12th to 13th centuries. Before this period, the language existed only as…
- Danish languageThe Viking Age left a mark on the English countryside that still echoes today. In Yorkshire, place names like Selby and Whitby end with -by, a suffix meaning…
- Norwegian languageThe Hole Runestone, carved between 1 and 250 CE, bears the inscription idiberug/n. This artifact stands as the oldest known writing in Norway and across all…
- Finnish languageThe Uralic language family traces its roots to a single ancestor called Proto-Uralic. This ancient tongue likely emerged between 8,000 and 2,000 BCE near the…
- Thai languageIn 1405, the Chinese explorer Ma Huan recorded the language of the Xiānluó kingdom in his book Yingya Shenglan. He noted that the local speech resembled the…
- Swedish languageIn the 8th century, a common Germanic language of Scandinavia called Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. This language underwent changes that did not spread…
- Ukrainian languageIn the 12th century, a specific sound shift began to reshape the speech of Kievan Rus. Old East Slavic words like kotъ /kote/ for cat evolved into kit /kit/…
- Italian languageThe Veronese Riddle dates to the 8th or early 9th century and stands as one of the earliest surviving texts that can be called vernacular.
- Portuguese languageIn 216 BC, Roman soldiers and merchants arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. They brought Latin with them to a land already home to Celtic tribes like the…
- Russian languageThe Ostromir Gospels of 1056 stand as one of the oldest East Slavic books known today. This manuscript preserves a form of language that would eventually…
- French languageFrench is a Romance language with about 310 million speakers, of which roughly 74 million are native speakers. It is an official language in 26 countries and…
- Icelandic languageAround 900 CE, Norse settlers brought Old Norse to the Faroe Islands and Iceland. The language spoken in these regions began its distinct path from that…
- Spanish languageThe name Spanish derives from the Kingdom of Castile, a historical region in north-central Spain. The term Castile itself likely comes from the word for…
- ArabicIn 125 CE, a man named Garm(')allāhe carved three lines of poetry into stone at En Avdat in Israel. This inscription stands as the earliest continuous Arabic…
- Faroese languageAround 900 AD, the language spoken in the Faroes was Old Norse. Norse settlers had brought this tongue with them during the time of settlement that began in…
- English languageIn the 5th century, Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossed the North Sea to settle in Britain. These people spoke dialects that would…
- Coptic languageThe earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using Greek letters date back to the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Scholars refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic…
- Greek languageGreek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.