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.

Discovery
The Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg announced the discovery of Kalasmaic in 2023, based on a clay tablet (indexed KBo 71.145 ) from the Bogazköy Archive excavated at Hattusa, the Hittite capital. The tablet, written in Hittite cuneiform of the 13th century BCE, is one of many in the archive recording rituals of the empire's subject and neighbouring peoples. Its Hittite-language introduction describes its main text as in "the language of the land of " (URUka-la-aš-mi-li ).

At the time its discovery was announced, the text itself had not been deciphered. Categorization of Kalasmaic within Anatolian is unclear; it is possibly a member of the Luwic branch. The text was published on 2 February 2024 by Daniel Schwemer.

A linguistic analysis by Ilya Yakubovich and Elisabeth Rieken is due to be published in 2024 in Archäologischer Anzeiger.