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Anatolian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family that was spoken in ancient Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and includes languages such as Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic. These languages are significant to linguists because they provide some of the oldest written records of any Indo-European language, offering crucial evidence for understanding how Indo-European languages evolved and dispersed.
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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 1st millennium AD, eventually succumbing to the Hellenization of Anatolia as a result of Greek colonisation.