Most of the concepts in Erlang have been taken from modern programming 
 languages   that have proven to be good. The languages Prolog, Strand, Parlog 
 and Eri-Pascal  have had an especially high influence. Erlang was created as 
 a result of ongoing  research at the Ericsson and Ellemtel Computer Science
 laboratory regarding ways  to improve the software development of telecom 
 applications. Many of the Erlang  primitives provide solutions to problems 
 that are commonly encountered when programming large, concurrent, real-time 
 systems.

 The language is based on the functional programmint theory.

 For more info, please, refer to http://www.erlang.org