Early humans in Africa develop the first forms of spoken language, a crucial step in human evolution.
The Sumerians develop cuneiform script, one of the earliest known writing systems in the world.
In Ancient Egypt, hieroglyphic writing emerges, used for religious and monumental texts.
In China, the earliest known Chinese writing emerges, engraved on bones and turtle shells for divination.
The Phoenicians develop one of the first alphabetic writing systems, which spreads across the Mediterranean via trade routes.
In South Asia, the Brahmi script emerges, the ancestor of nearly all modern Indian writing systems.
The Maya civilization develops one of the most advanced writing systems of pre-Columbian America.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, spoken Latin gradually evolves into separate Romance languages such as French, Spanish and Italian.
King Sejong the Great introduces Hangul, a deliberately designed phonetic alphabet to promote literacy among the Korean people.
The Cherokee craftsman Sequoyah creates a completely original writing system for the Cherokee language in North America.
Colonial and local authorities in East Africa formalize Swahili as a written standard language for education, administration and trade.
The People's Republic of China introduces the Hanyu Pinyin system to write Mandarin Chinese phonetically in Latin letters.
Linguists warn that globalization and dominant world languages threaten to make hundreds of languages disappear, while initiatives for language preservation are increasing.
The rise of platforms such as Twitter, WhatsApp and later TikTok causes rapid spread of new words, abbreviations and emoji use across language boundaries.
Large language models and neural translation systems enable real-time translation between hundreds of languages, including previously poorly documented languages in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.
Indigenous communities worldwide use artificial intelligence to document dying languages, develop teaching materials and build voice assistants in their own language.
Sequoyah, who himself could not read or write English, observed how colonists communicated with paper and decided to design a writing system that did justice to the sounds of his own language. The result was a syllabary of 86 characters, which within a few years was learned and used by thousands of Cherokee for newspapers, Bible translations and administrative documents. It is one of the rare examples in which a single person demonstrably devised a complete functioning writing system for a language, giving the Cherokee Nation a powerful means to preserve their language despite increasing American pressure and displacement.