Hattic

Hattic is an extinct, non-Indo-European language spoken in central Anatolia during the second millennium BC by the Hattians, the region's population before the arrival of the Indo-European Hittites, and it remains unclassified, with no securely demonstrated relatives, though some scholars have tentatively proposed distant links to the Northwest Caucasian or Kartvelian languages. No independent Hattic texts survive; the language is known only indirectly, through Hittite religious tablets that preserve Hattic ritual formulas, incantations and bilingual passages, since the Hittites absorbed much of Hatti's religious and mythological tradition even as they replaced its language politically. Hattic is believed to have died out as an everyday spoken language by around 900 BC, but its ceremonial use persisted far longer in Hittite temple cult, where certain prayers and titles were preserved in Hattic long after ordinary Hattic speech had disappeared. Its agglutinative structure, quite unlike the inflectional grammar of Hittite, marks it as a genuine linguistic survival from pre-Indo-European Anatolia.