Palaic

Palaic is an extinct Anatolian language of the Indo-European family, spoken in northern Anatolia during the Bronze Age and known only from a small number of religious and ritual texts preserved in the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa. Alongside Hittite and the Luwic languages, it forms one of the recognized branches of Anatolian, and despite the thinness of its surviving corpus it shows familiar Indo-European features such as grammatical gender, a functioning case system and inflected verbs. The language is believed to have gone extinct by around 1300 BC, when the region where it was spoken was overrun by the Kaskians, a non-Indo-European people the Hittites regarded as persistent northern raiders. Because its entire textual record consists of a handful of hymns and rituals invoking gods with Hattic and other non-Indo-European names, Palaic offers a rare glimpse of a Bronze Age Anatolian language known almost solely through its religious vocabulary.