Sumerian

The language of ancient Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, the earliest written language and a language isolate with no demonstrated relationship to any other known tongue. Sumerian was the medium of the world’s first literature, law, and administration, recorded in the cuneiform script that its speakers invented around 3100 BCE and that went on to write a dozen later languages of the Near East. Speakers called it eme-gir, “the native tongue,” distinguishing the main register from eme-sal, a special form used for certain cultic and literary speech. Sumerian had probably died out as an everyday spoken language by about 2000 BCE, giving way to Akkadian in the mouths of the population.

Its death as a vernacular was not the end of its life. For two thousand years afterward Sumerian survived as the classical, liturgical, and scholarly language of Mesopotamia, learned and copied by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes who maintained it much as medieval Europe maintained Latin, down to the last cuneiform tablets of the first century BCE. The reconstruction of its grammar and the values of its signs remains an active and sometimes contested field, since the language is recovered entirely from the script and from the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists that ancient scribes compiled to teach it.

@misc{onomastikon-sumerian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Sumerian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/sumerian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}