Hittite (natively
nešili "[in the language] of
Neša") 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&_160;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. Because of marked differences in its structure and phonology, some linguists, most notably Edgar H. Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill, argued that it should be classified as a sister language to the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language, formulating the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. Other linguists, however, continue to accept the traditional 19th century view of the primacy of Proto-Indo-European and interpret the unusual features of Hittite as mainly due to later innovations. Still others claim Hittite, as well as its Anatolian cousins, split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage, thereby preserving archaisms that were later lost in the other Indo-European languages.[citation needed]
"Hittite" is a modern name, chosen after the (still disputed) identification of the Hatti kingdom with the Hittites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
