Anatolian languages

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The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey). The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, the earliest-attested Indo-European language. Only discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Anatolian languages are probably the earliest branch to have split from Proto-Indo-European. The presence of the laryngeal consonants ḫ and ḫḫ in Hittite and Luwian provided support for the laryngeal theory of Indo-European linguistics. While Hittite attestation ends after the Bronze Age, hieroglyphic Luwian survived until the conquest of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms by the Semitic Assyrian Empire, and alphabetic inscriptions of Anatolian languages are fragmentarily attested until the early 1st millennium AD, eventually succumbing to the hellenization of Anatolia as a result of Greek colonisation.

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