Hittite Language

Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records from the 16th (Anitta text) down to the 13th century BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords or names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC.Dialects derived from Hittite may have been spoken after the Bronze Age collapse in various parts of Anatolia and northern Syria, in the so-called Neo-Hittite states of the Early Iron Age.Hittite is the earliest attested Indo-European language, rediscovered only more than a century after the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis had been formulated.