"What was the language spoken before Babel?"
^ Oh this is easy. Just ask any KJV only advocate and they'll happily tell you it was the "King's English."
Ok, seriously, a discovered Sumerian tablet provides an extrabiblical archeological perspective on the biblical story of a time when all languages were one on the earth.
And using ancient Babylonian records and texts that are lost to us, Berossus referred to it in the Babyloniaca which he published in the 3rd century BCE. The Sumerian documents which include this account date back to about 3,000 BCE. See 'Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,' for example.
See Herodotus 460 BCE and the cuneiform tablet dated 229 BCE; Samuel Noah Kramer's 'The Babel of Tongues: A Sumerian Version,' in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 108–111; Nahum M. Sarna's 'Understanding Genesis' (1968): 63–80; A. Parrot's 'The Tower of Babel' (1955).
The Genesis account identifies the land of "Shinar" as the location of the Tower of Babel. This is the land of "Sumer" where many ancient documents of the Sumerians have been discovered.
But before you simply say, well then it was the language of Sumer remember that when God created Adam he spoke to him (Genesis 2:16) indicating that God gave Adam a language and this language came from God himself (and was not a result of Darwinian evolution).
When we look at all the names of Adam's descendent we find that all the names from Adam to Noah and his children are Hebrew names, meaning that their name has a meaning in Hebrew. For instance, Methuselah (Genesis 5:21) is Hebrew for "his death brings" (The flood occurred the year that he died). It is not until we come to Noah's grandchildren that we find names that are of a language other than Hebrew. For instance, the name Nimrod (Genesis 11:18), who was from Babylon/Sumer/Shinar and possibly the Tower of Babel, is a non-Hebrew name.
According to the Biblical record of names, Adam and his descendants spoke Hebrew. In addition, Jewish tradition as well as some Christian Scholars, believed that Hebrew was the original language of man. But could this be a translation into Hebrew from the original language? We cannot know with perfect certainty.
"It is generally assumed that, like the city, the tower was incomplete (v. 8), and that it was a staged temple tower or multi-storeyed ziggurat first developed in Babylonia in the early 3rd millennium bc from the low temenos or platform supporting a shrine set up near the main city temples (as at Erech and ’Uqair). After Sharkalisharri the earliest reference to the ziggurat at Babylon is to its restoration by Esarhaddon in 681–665 bc. This was named in Sumerian ‘Etemenanki’—‘the Building of the Foundation-platform of Heaven and Earth’ ‘whose top reaches to heaven’ and associated with the temple of Marduk Esagila, ‘the Building whose top is in heaven’.
It is very probable that such a sacred edifice followed an earlier plan. The tower was severely damaged in the war of 652–648 bc but restored again by Nebuchadrezzar II (605–562 bc). It was this building, part of which was recovered by Koldewey in 1899, which was described by Herodotus on his visit c. 460 bc and is discussed in a cuneiform tablet dated 229 bc (Louvre, AO 6555). These enable an approximate picture of the later tower to be given. The base stage measured × m and was 33 m high. Above this were built five platforms, each 6–18 m high but of diminishing area.
The whole was crowned by a temple where the god was thought to descend for intercourse with mankind. Access was by ramps or stairways. A late Babylonian plan of a seven-staged ziggurat shows that the architectural form was a height equal to the width at base with a cubic temple on the summit. Among others, ziggurats were found in *Ur, *Erech, *Nineveh and elsewhere in *Assyria and *Babylonia.
The ziggurat at Babylon was demolished by Xerxes in 472 bc, and though Alexander cleared the rubble prior to its restoration this was thwarted by his death. The bricks were subsequently removed by the local inhabitants, and today the site of Etemenanki is a pit (Es-Saḥn) as deep as the original construction was high.
Travelers of all ages have sought to locate the ruined tower of Babel. Some identify it with the site described above and others with the visible remains of a ziggurat still visible at Borsippa (mod. Birs Nimrūd) 11 km SSW of Babylon, which is probably of Neo-Babylonian date. Yet others place the biblical tower at Dūr-Kurigalzu (Aqar Quf, W of Baghdad, a city which was, however, built c. 1400 bc. All that can certainly be said is that the Gn. 11 account bears all the marks of a reliable historical account of buildings which can no longer be traced.
Some scholars associate Jacob’s vision of a ladder and a ‘gate or heaven’ (Gn. 28:11–18) with a ziggurat of the kind once built at Babel. According to Gn. 11:9, the intervention of Yahweh at the building of Babel led to the confusion of tongues and the subsequent dispersion of mankind, possibly in the days of Peleg (Gn. 10:25). (*Nations, Table of; Gn. 10.)
Babel, as *Babylon throughout its history, became a symbol of the pride of man and his inevitable fall. Babel was also theologically linked with the confusion and broken fellowship between men and nations when separated from God. Its effects are to be reversed in God’s final kingdom, but there is no certainty that the *tongues or glossolalia of Acts 2:4 cf. the interpretation of Joel in vv. 16–21), which were confined to Jews and proselytes and largely Aramaic- and Greek-speaking peoples, were other than known ‘foreign languages’ (JTS n.s. 17, 1966, pp. 299–307)."
^ Reference: Wiseman, D. J. (1996). Babel. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard & J. I. Packer (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard & J. I. Packer, Ed.) (3rd ed.) (109–110). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.