The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
Where it was spoken
Sumerian was the language of the city-states of southern Mesopotamia — Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Eridu — from before 3000 BCE. By around 2000 BCE it had been replaced as a spoken language by Akkadian, but it continued for nearly two more millennia as the prestige language of scholarship, religion, and royal inscription.
What it sounded like
An agglutinative language unrelated to any other known family. Verbs took up to fifteen prefixes and suffixes marking person, tense, mood, and direction. Two grammatical genders (animate and inanimate) and free word order constrained by ergative-absolutive case marking.
How it’s written
Cuneiform — invented by the Sumerians around 3200 BCE — is the world’s first writing system. The wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets initially encoded pictograms, then evolved into a mixed logographic-syllabic script. Schoolboys copied Sumerian texts for two thousand years after no one spoke the language.
Find more languages by letter
Sumerian starts with S and ends with N. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Sumerian":