Kalašma language

The Kalašma language, or Kalasmaic, is an extinct Anatolian language spoken in the late Bronze Age polity of Kalašma, which lay on the northwest fringe of the Hittite Empire, likely in or around what is now the Turkish province of Bolu.^[1]

Kalašma
Kalasmaic, Kalasmian
Native to	Kalašma
Region	Anatolia
Era	13th century BCE
Language family	Indo-European Anatolian Luwo-Lydian? Luwo-Palaic? Luwic? Kalašma
Writing system	Hittite cuneiform
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)

Discovery

The first (and thus far only) Kalasmaic text was discovered in 2023, by researchers at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. It is written on a clay tablet indexed KBo 71.145.^[2] The tablet, written in Hittite cuneiform of the 13th century BCE,^[2] is one of several Hittite texts recording rituals of the empire's subjects and neighbouring peoples.^[1] Its Hittite-language introduction describes its main text as in "the language of Kalašma" (^URUka-la-aš-mi-li^[2]).

The language was deciphered by Prof. Daniel Schwemer in the 71st volume of the edition "Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi (Cuneiform Texts from Boghazköi)"^[3] and is part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family as confirmed by Prof. Elisabeth Rieken at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Its place within the Anatolian languages is uncertain, but it has been hypothesized to be part of the Luwic subgroup.^[4][5][6]

A detailed analysis of the text was published in November 2024 by Elisabeth Rieken, Ilya Yakubovich and Daniel Schwemer.^[7]