Luwian

Luwian is an extinct Anatolian language of the Indo-European family, closely related to Hittite and grouped with Lycian and Carian in a proposed Luwic sub-branch. It was spoken across central and western Anatolia and into northern Syria during the second and first millennia BC, and Luwian speakers came to dominate the Hittite capital Hattusa by the fourteenth century BC even as Hittite remained the empire's chancery language. The language survives in two distinct scripts, Cuneiform Luwian, preserved mainly in ritual texts from the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries BC, and Hieroglyphic Luwian, a native pictographic system of roughly 500 signs used for monumental inscriptions from the twelfth through seventh centuries BC by the Neo-Hittite states of Syria and southeastern Anatolia. Luwian finally died out around 600 BC, but its many archaic features, including a three-way distinction among velar consonants, have made it valuable evidence for reconstructing Proto-Indo-European.