Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.

Undiscovered until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Anatolian languages are often believed to be the earliest branch to have split from the Proto Indo-European family. Once discovered, the presence of laryngeal consonants ḫ and ḫḫ in Hittite and Luwian provided support for the laryngeal theory of Proto-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 in Anatolian languages are fragmentarily attested until the early first millennium AD, eventually succumbing to the Hellenization of Anatolia as a result of Greek colonisation.

The Anatolian branch is often considered the earliest to have split from the Proto-Indo-European language, from a stage referred to either as Indo-Hittite or "Archaic PIE"; typically a date in the mid-4th millennium BC is assumed for the evolution of this branch, followed by a migration into Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC. Under the Kurgan hypothesis, there are two possibilities for how the early Anatolian speakers could have reached Anatolia: from the north via the Caucasus, or from the west, via the Balkans; the latter is considered somewhat more likely by Mallory (1989), Steiner (1990), and Anthony (2007). Statistical research by Quentin Atkinson and others using Bayesian inference and glottochronological markers favors an Indo-European origin in Anatolia, though the method's validity and accuracy are subject to debate, and this is a minority view concerning the Urheimat of PIE.

It has been theorized that Cernavodă culture, together with the Sredny Stog culture, was the source of Anatolian languages and introduced them to Anatolia through the Balkans after Anatolian split from the Proto-Indo-Anatolian language, which some linguists and archaeologists place in the area of the Sredny Stog culture. Petra Goedegebuure suggests Anatolian separated from PIE in the north by 4500 BC and had arrived in Anatolia by about 2500-2000 BC, via a migration route through the Caucasus.

Melchert (2012) has proposed the following classification:

Kloekhorst (2022) has proposed a more detailed classification, with estimated dating for some of the reconstructed stages:

In addition, the recently discovered Kalašma language is believed to be a Luwic language.

The phonology of the Anatolian languages preserves distinctions lost in its sister branches of Indo-European. Famously, the Anatolian languages retain the PIE laryngeals in words such as Hittite ḫāran- (cf. Ancient Greek ὄρνῑς, Lithuanian eręlis, Old Norse ǫrn, PIE *h₃éron-) and Lycian 𐊜𐊒𐊄𐊀 χuga (cf. Latin avus, Old Prussian awis, Archaic Irish ᚐᚃᚔ (avi), PIE *h₂éwh₂s). The three dorsal consonant series of PIE also remained distinct in Proto-Anatolian and have different reflexes in the Luwic languages, e.g. Luwian where *kʷ > ku-, *k > k-, and *ḱ > z-. The three-way distinction in Proto-Indo-European stops (i.e. *p, *b, *bʰ) collapsed into a fortis-lenis distinction in Proto-Anatolian, conventionally written as /p/ vs. /b/. In Hittite and Luwian cuneiform, the lenis stops were written as single voiceless consonants while the fortis stops were written as doubled voiceless, indicating a geminated pronunciation. By the first millennium, the lenis consonants seem to have been spirantized in Lydian, Lycian, and Carian.