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The Origins & Evolution Of Human Language / Languages

Thanks, Ermintrude.
Being a languages student, many (Many!) years ago, the curious history of the spoken word has always fascinated me.
One example, which illustrates the point in the article, is that the word for 'hole' in a huge number of languages from Maori to Gaelic to Basque, requires the speaker to make a roughly circular shape with their lips to pronounce it.
 
Coal said:
If you view the shapes as waveforms, the 'kiki' has more high frequency components than 'bouba
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This is an entirely-valid point (and many thanks for having stated this) that from an oscilloscopic perspective (presuming conventional plot axes for both time and amplitude domains) the shapes are indeed analogues of their respective sounds. This would be the case with both an electronic oscilloscope, or via a classic transducerless experimental kymograph.

This immediately makes me realise something that's now blindingly-obvious.....handwritten language, the roman letter-forms themselves: the action of writing creates shapes as if the scribe were an oscillograph... The letter-words themselves look like the sounds they represent....orthography recaptilates philology.

This sudden realisation must already be known, universally. But I was totally-unaware of this myself (perhaps somehow, subconsciously I realised this, instinctively)
 
Yes. There's definitely something in that, Ermintrude. This was touched on in the original article I linked to, which referred to "sound symbolism". I also just Googled "waveform for O sound" and compared it with "waveform for ee sound". The former has widely spaced crests and troughs, or gentle "bouba"-like curves, whereas the latter has close-together "kiki" spikes.
 
Ermintrude said:
This is an entirely-valid point (and many thanks for having stated this) that from an oscilloscopic perspective (presuming conventional plot axes for both time and amplitude domains) the shapes are indeed analogues of their respective sounds. This would be the case with both an electronic oscilloscope, or via a classic transducerless experimental kymograph.

This immediately makes me realise something that's now blindingly-obvious.....handwritten language, the roman letter-forms themselves: the action of writing creates shapes as if the scribe were an oscillograph... The letter-words themselves look like the sounds they represent....orthography recaptilates philology.

This sudden realisation must already be known, universally. But I was totally-unaware of this myself (perhaps somehow, subconsciously I realised this, instinctively)
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Once you've spent some time pondering the nature of all wave-forms being composed of harmonics of other frequencies , it kind of leaps out at you.

It would be interesting to digitally re-create the basic form of written script for words such as "kiki" and "bouba" as a 'continuous wave' and then run it through an FFT and look at the frequency domain plots and see what the correlation was with the frequency domain plots of the sounds of the spoken words themselves. My suspicion is that there will be a correlation in the pattern of distribution of the frequency components, but the absolute place on the frequency spectrum will shift, rather like the same tune played in one key or another.
 
Coal said:
Once you've spent some time pondering the nature of all wave-forms being composed of harmonics of other frequencies , it kind of leaps out at you.

It would be interesting to digitally re-create the basic form of written script for words such as "kiki" and "bouba" as a 'continuous wave' and then run it through an FFT and look at the frequency domain plots and see what the correlation was with the frequency domain plots of the sounds of the spoken words themselves. My suspicion is that there will be a correlation in the pattern of distribution of the frequency components, but the absolute place on the frequency spectrum will shift, rather like the same tune played in one key or another.
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The harmonics in the frequency domain or the FFT in the time domain are both just the results of the verbal words and in themselves are just resultants (not causal) that in no way effect language in any possible way "that that I think of". All sounds that are not a pure tone have harmonics and as a result will produce a Fourier transfer that has numerous components. An FFT is just the digital and practical form of the of the Fourier transform.
 
Jim said:
The harmonics in the frequency domain or the FFT in the time domain are both just the results of the verbal words and in themselves are just resultants (not causal) that in no way effect language in any possible way "that that I think of". All sounds that are not a pure tone have harmonics and as a result will produce a Fourier transfer that has numerous components. An FFT is just the digital and practical form of the of the Fourier transform.
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But haven't we just established that shapes with sharper angles, suggestive of higher frequency components in the time domain tend to be described with and ascribed words that in themselves have more high frequency components?

(When compared with more rounded shapes and their descriptive words).

It's a reasonable working hypothesis.
 
Coal said:
But haven't we just established that shapes with sharper angles, suggestive of higher frequency components in the time domain tend to be described with and ascribed words that in themselves have more high frequency components?

(When compared with more rounded shapes and their descriptive words).

It's a reasonable working hypothesis.
Click to expand...
All this is true but what does it prove? In my mind just that we can analyze the sounds we make in the time and frequency domains. But that's just me.
 
Orangutan squeaks reveal language evolution, says study

Scientists who spent years listening to the communication calls of one of our closest ape relatives say their eavesdropping has shed light on the origin of human language.
Dr Adriano Reis e Lameira from Durham University recorded and analysed almost 5,000 orangutan "kiss squeaks".
He found that the animals combined these purse-lipped, "consonant-like" calls to convey different messages.
This could be a glimpse of how our ancestors formed the earliest words.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

"Human language is extraordinarily advanced and complex - we can pretty much transmit any information we want into sound," said Dr Reis e Lameira.
"So we tend to think that maybe words evolved from some rudimentary precursor to transmit more complex messages.
"We were basically using the orangutan vocal behaviour as a time machine - back to a time when our ancestors were using what would become [those precursors] of consonants and vowels."

The team studied kiss squeaks in particular because, like many consonants - the /t/, /p/, /k/ sounds - they depend on the action of the lips, tongue and jaw rather than the voice.
"Kiss squeaks do not involve vocal fold action, so they're acoustically and articulatory consonant-like," explained Dr Reis e Lameira.

There has been very little study of consonants in language research, but as Prof Serge Wich from Liverpool John Moores University, a lead author in the study, explained, they are crucial building blocks in the evolution of language.
"Most human languages have a lot more consonants than vowels," said Prof Wich. "And if we have more building blocks, we have more combinations."

The scientists recorded and analysed 4,486 kiss-squeaks collected from 48 animals in four wild populations.
With thousands of hours of listening as the apes communicated, the researchers found that the animals embedded several different bits of information in their squeaks.
The team compared this to how we might use more than one word to convey the same meaning - saying "car" but also "automobile" and "vehicle"
"They seemed to make doubly sure that the message was received, so they would send the same message with different [kiss squeak combination] signals,"

The scientists say their study suggests that, rather than a concerted effort to form complex words, it might have been this "redundancy" - forming different sounds that had the same meaning, in order to reinforce a message - that drove early language evolution.
Dr Reis e Lameira added: "It's a way of making sure you don't end up in a game of Chinese whispers."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38907681
 
Anonymous said:
First language gene discoverd ...
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It now appears that the importance attributed to the FOXP2 gene was erroneously overestimated owing to faults with the methodology underlying the 2002 paper's analysis.

Genome Study Upends Understanding of How Language Evolved
The evolution of human language was once thought to have hinged on changes to a single gene that were so beneficial that they raced through ancient human populations. But an analysis now suggests that this gene, FOXP2, did not undergo changes in Homo sapiens’ recent history after all—and that previous findings might simply have been false signals.

“The situation’s a lot more complicated than the very clean story that has been making it into textbooks all this time,” says Elizabeth Atkinson, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper, which was published on August 2 in Cell.

Originally discovered in a family who had a history of profound speech and language disorders, FOXP2 was the first gene found to be involved in language production. Later research touted its importance to the evolution of human language.

A key 2002 paper found that humans carry two mutations to FOXP2 not found in any other primates. When the researchers looked at genetic variation surrounding these mutations, they found the signature of a ‘selective sweep’—in which a beneficial mutation quickly becomes common across a population. This change to FOXP2 seemed to have happened in the past 200,000 years, the team reported in Nature. The paper has been cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature.

The idea that uniquely human changes to FOXP2 led to language development has not gone unchallenged. ...

Despite such questions, the 2002 study has never been repeated. It was based on the genomes of only 20 individuals, including just a handful of people of African ancestry, says Atkinson: most came from Europe, Asia and other regions. She and her team have now re-examined the gene’s evolutionary history using a larger data set and a more diverse population.

They found that the signal that had looked like a selective sweep in the 2002 study was probably a statistical artefact caused by lumping Africans together with Eurasians and other populations. With more—and more varied—genomes to study, the team was able to look for a selective sweep in FOXP2, separately, in Africans and non-Africans—but found no evidence in either.

“It’s good that it is now clear there is actually no sweep signal at FOXP2,” says evolutionary geneticist Wolfgang Enard of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, who was a co-author of the 2002 study. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...upends-understanding-of-how-language-evolved/
 
Newly published research suggests a linkage between the earliest origins of speech (the instrumentality underlying linguistic communication) and lip-smacking behaviors in higher primates.
Chimpanzee Lip-Smacks Help Trace the Evolution of Human Speech Back to Ancient Ancestors

Chimpanzee lip-smacks exhibit a speech-like rhythm, a group of researchers led by the University of Warwick have found.

They found chimpanzees produce lip-smacks at a speech-like rhythm of open-close mouth cycles close to 5Hz (i.e. 5 open-close cycles per second), confirming that speech-rhythm was built upon existing primate signal systems.

Similarly to chimpanzees, fast-paced mouth signals with a speech-like rhythm have now been described in orangutans and several monkey species, confirming altogether that speech has ancient roots within primate communication.

One of the most promising theories for the evolution of human speech has finally received support from chimpanzee communication, in a study conducted by a group of researchers led by the University of Warwick.

The evolution of speech is one of the longest-standing puzzles of evolution. However, inklings of a possible solution started emerging some years ago when monkey signals involving a quick succession of mouth open-close cycles were shown to exhibit the same pace of human spoken language. ...
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FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/chimpanzee...on-of-human-speech-back-to-ancient-ancestors/
 
Here are the bibliographic particulars on the published study cited above. The full report is accessible at the link below.

“Chimpanzee lip-smacks confirm primate continuity for speech-rhythm evolution”
André S. Pereira, Eithne Kavanagh, Catherine Hobaiter, Katie E. Slocombe and Adriano R. Lameira
27 May 2020, Biology Letters.
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2020.0232

Full report available at this link:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2020.0232
 
New research from Finland suggests reported speech (talking about what someone says / said) could explain the origins of certain grammatical structures found throughout human languages.
New Study Explains Why Human Languages Share a Lot of The Same Grammar

There are around 7,000 human languages that we know of worldwide, and while they're all unique, they're also more similar than you might have realized – particularly when it comes to the grammar, or the way that sentences can be formed and used.

That might be because of certain genetic tendencies, scientists have theorized, or perhaps it's down to the cognitive capacities that all human beings share, like the passage of time that enables us to develop past and future tenses.

A new study proposes a different reason behind this shared grammar: the way that we talk about language itself.

"We propose that in the evolution of language, talking about language was a way of forming some of the first complex language structures and that from these structures new types of grammar could develop," says linguist Stef Spronck, from the University of Helsinki in Finland.

In many languages, reported (or indirect) speech – so sentences indirectly communicating what someone has said, rather than someone actually saying it – can give rise to new meanings that fit with certain grammatical categories.

For instance, "He said, 'I will go'" can also mean "he might go" or "he is about to go" in certain languages. Those additional interpretations aren't exactly reported speech, but they're derived from it.

This extension of meaning, found in certain languages where reported speech is used, can be matched with grammatical constructions like aspect (how something extends over time), modality (discussing possible situations), and topic (what is being talked about), the researchers contend. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-explains-why-human-languages-share-a-lot-of-the-same-grammar

PUBLISHED RESEARCH REPORT: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.624486/full
 
The influence of agriculture. How do you say Get Off My Land! in Tungusic?

A tiny grain of millet may have given birth to one of the most mysterious—and widespread—language families on Earth, according to the largest study yet of linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence from about a dozen countries across Asia.

The Transeurasian languages, sometimes known as Altaic, include the languages of Siberia, Mongolia, Central Asia, and possibly Japan and the Korean Peninsula. The new study suggests the language family arose in northeastern China 9000 years ago, expanding with the spread of agriculture.

“It’s convincing,” says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at Australian National University who wasn’t involved with the work. “Languages don’t just go wandering off by themselves; they expand because the people who speak those languages spread.” Farming, he adds, is a strong reason for such an expansion.

The origins of so-called Transeurasian languages—about 80 at the highest count—are hotly debated. Some linguists believe they sprang from the same source, but others say extensive borrowing between ancient languages explains why certain sounds, terms, and grammatical features are common among many tongues, from Turkish to Tungusic. Some researchers had suggested the family arose about 5000 years ago with nomadic shepherds in Central Asia.

Martine Robbeets, an archaeolinguist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has long believed the Transeurasian languages belong to one family. To bring new evidence to the debate, she teamed up with linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists from China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea to build an extensive linguistic family tree for languages across Eurasia. They focused on what Robbeets calls “culture-free” vocabulary, including words for basic items such as “field,” “pig,” and “house.” ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...one-world-s-most-mysterious-language-families
 
Newly published research indicates gestures rather than vocalizations served as the starting point for language evolution.
New Experiments Hint Human Language Likely Didn't Start With Grunts

... Recently, a team of researchers set up some experiments to explore the trope that our early human ancestors grunted at each other as a means of communication.

As the main function of language is to convey meaning across people, the researchers tested to see whether gestures or non-verbal sounds were more effective at getting meaning across.

Two groups of 30 volunteers across different cultures (Australian and Vanuatuan) had to try and convey specified meanings using either gestures or non-verbal vocalizations – a bit like a game of charades.

The same exercise was repeated with 10 sighted and 10 blind volunteers, who were tasked with producing the gestured or non-verbal communications, while a group of undergraduates tried to understand what they meant.

Successful communication was twice as high when the producers were gesturing than vocalizing, both cross-culturally and when blind or sighted ...

"These findings are consistent with a gesture-first theory of language origin," the team wrote in their paper. ...

"Gesture is more successful than vocalization because gestured signals are more universal than vocal signals," the researchers concluded. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/experi...burst-onto-the-scene-with-gestures-not-grunts
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Fay N, Walker B, Ellison TM, Blundell Z, De Kleine N, Garde M, Lister CJ, Goldin-Meadow S. 2022
Gesture is the primary modality for language creation.
Proc. R. Soc. B 289: 20220066.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0066

Abstract
How language began is one of the oldest questions in science, but theories remain speculative due to a lack of direct evidence. Here, we report two experiments that generate empirical evidence to inform gesture-first and vocal-first theories of language origin; in each, we tested modern humans’ ability to communicate a range of meanings (995 distinct words) using either gesture or non-linguistic vocalization. Experiment 1 is a cross-cultural study, with signal Producers sampled from Australia (n = 30, Mage = 32.63, s.d.=12.42) and Vanuatu (n=30, Mage=32.40, s.d.=11.76). Experiment 2 is a cross-experiential study in which Producers were either sighted (n = 10, Mage=39.60, s.d.=11.18) or severely vision-impaired (n=10, Mage= 39.40, s.d. = 10.37). A group of undergraduate student Interpreters guessed the meaning of the signals created by the Producers (n = 140). Communication success was substantially higher in the gesture modality than the vocal modality (twice as high overall; 61.17% versus 29.04% success). This was true within cultures, across cultures and even for the signals produced by severely vision-impaired participants. The success of gesture is attributed in part to its greater universality (i.e. similarity in form across different Producers). Our results support the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation.

SOURCE / FULL REPORT: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.0066
 
Just as a slight aside, I see my granddaughter, who's just turned 2, a couple of days a week and it never fails to amaze me how rapidly her language develops.
Not so long ago, her use of language was incredibly concise and economical.
Examples are "what are you doing?" would be truncated to "what doing?", "where is the cat?" would be "where cat (or Puss)?", "I want some milk" became "want milk", "I don't want to eat/do that would be simply "don't want" etc.
She's now beginning to fill in the blanks with pronouns and definite articles.
I suspect earliest human language would have been similarly concise, expressing essentials as economically as possibly. It was only much later that linguistic bells and whistles became tacked on.
 
EnolaGaia said:
It now appears that the importance attributed to the FOXP2 gene was erroneously overestimated owing to faults with the methodology underlying the 2002 paper's analysis.



FULL STORY: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...upends-understanding-of-how-language-evolved/
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I was at the New Scientist Exhibition in London in 2017 and caught the last 10 minute of a talk on the 'Genetics of Language' by Prof Steve Jones from UCL (a bit of a hero of mine). This was before the paper from Scientific American in the link. Prof Jones claimed a mutation in the FOXP2 gene (presumably associated with the Broca's and Wernicke's speech centres) was present in chimpanzees and Neanderthals but a second mutation only existed in humans and that's what gave us the ability for complex language. A member of the audience queried if that meant Neanderthals couldn't talk like wot we do and we were all taken slightly aback by the answer 'if they didn't have the second mutation then presumably they only had a gutteral language' I was thinking of this a few days ago when there was another Neanderthal reconstruction prog on telly, reinforcing the idea that they were 'just like' modern humans. Back to the origin of language - my understanding is that Neanderthals didn't originate in Africa, but if language did then where did they pick it up ?
 
Bad Bungle said:
... Back to the origin of language - my understanding is that Neanderthals didn't originate in Africa, but if language did then where did they pick it up ?
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Some means for signaling ("communication" in the most general sense) exists in all primates. There is no reason to suspect, much less believe, there's a single "language" ability that started in some particular time / space locale and spread throughout all early hominins / humans. All prehistoric / ancestral human types seem to have lived in groups, and such "communication" is required to coordinate behaviors and actions within a group.

Neanderthals communicated all on their own.

Our modern overwhelming reliance on verbal / textual modes of communication tends to make us overlook the wide range of expressiveness that can be achieved via gestures and basic sounds ("noises" as contrasted with "speech").

IMHO the more relevant issues concern the neural and physiological capacities for generating, and the psycho-social scenarios motivating, the more complex communication protocols sufficient for the sharing of abstract concepts, intentions, and implications.

Long story short ... I suspect the alleged disadvantages Neanderthals may have (I emphasize "may have" ... ) had with respect to handling modern humans' complex vocalizations and / or symbolic abstraction need not have been all that disadvantageous in their daily lives and survival.

To the extent we think we know Neanderthals from the very scattered and fragmentary record, they seemed to live in small (probably familial) groups and operate as subsistence hunters in relatively fixed locations. The evidence seems to indicate a strong degree of stasis and group isolation, which is consistent with genetic indications of heavy inbreeding and evidence indicating local group collapses correlated with major climatic and environment changes. Small isolated groups aren't likely to generate elaborate or long-lasting linguistic traditions, and in the absence of longer-distance trade outside their immediate locale they didn't need to participate in any broader linguistic population.

In other words, I don't think Neanderthals had much need for complex symbolic interactions, and their communicational needs were probably adequately met via gestures and limited vocalizations.
 
Did human language evolve from birdsong?

Two centuries ago, the clergyman and antiquary John Bathurst Deane published The Worship of the Serpent (1830), which attempted to explain the entirety of non-Abrahamic religions worldwide as a unified, prehistoric serpent cult descended from the first idolaters, who worshiped the Serpent from the Garden of Eden, i.e. Satan. To make the claim, Deane took an exceedingly common motif—serpents, after all, can be found everywhere and appear regularly in myths and art as a result—and abstracted from it a unified faith that didn’t exist.

Now, novelist and onetime documentarian Ben H. Gagnon has done something similar with a different, very common motif: birds. In his new book Church of Birds, which he discussed in a blog post last week, Gagnon attempts to make the case that ancient people around the world positioned their sacred sites along the paths of migrating birds, which were seen as divine messengers and psychopomps. He also claims, with little evidence, that humans learned to speak by imitating birdsong. (That claim comes from a 2013 MIT study that does not appear to be widely accepted.) Ultimately, in Church of Birds, Gagnon argues that virtually every religion, including the Abrahamic faiths, is grounded in the worship of birds’ migration patterns and occasional transportation of exotic seeds.

Superficially, Gagnon’s ideas aren’t particularly implausible. People around the world recognized the importance of birds, and birds play a role in various mythologies. There are both practical and symbolic reasons for ancient people to have incorporated birds into their belief systems. Birds, after all, were sources of food, both meat and eggs, and birds’ ability to fly provided poetic metaphor for deities, angels, souls, and other supernatural beliefs.

However, Gagnon abstracts from this the claim a unified global pattern that probably isn’t connected to a single source. In his March 31 blog post to promote the book, he uses this to claim that the Nazca lines were designed to “welcome” migratory birds. “In this context it’s plausible the Nazca Lines were the backdrop for a ritual welcome of migratory birds from the north and the seeds they carried with the spring rains.” He bases this on bird imagery in art, which is basically found everywhere because birds are found everywhere, and the claim that ancient cultures were found along bird migration paths. That latter claim might have been interesting if birds didn’t migrate along resource-rich zones, particularly along coasts and major rivers. Gagnon compares bird flyways to ancient American geoglyph sites, but the results are cherry-picked. ...

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/author-claims-ancient-sites-and-myths-connect-to-global-bird-cult


The MIT study cited is:

How human language could have evolved from birdsong​


https://news.mit.edu/2013/how-human-language-could-have-evolved-from-birdsong-0221
 
Given the remarkable linguistic coincidences across unrelated human languages, with Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, Gaelic, Hawaiian, English, Hungarian, Chinese and loads of others sharing identical or very similar words (check out the lists at the link below), would it be reasonable to predict that, if we ever do make contact with a sapient alien species capable of vocal communication, some of their vocabulary to describe the fundamental basics of life, may not be unfamiliar to us?

https://johanna-hypatia.livejournal.com/176105.html
 
But there are so many languages and so many simple words... how many words and language pairings are just as remarkably dissimilar?
 
LymeswoldSnork said:
But there are so many languages and so many simple words... how many words and language pairings are just as remarkably dissimilar?
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Loads of course.
The point I was making though (and indeed did make some 7 years ago on this thread) was that synaesthesia, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism and sound waveforms all appear to have a bearing on the astonishing similarity of certain fundamental words in totally unrelated languages. I thought it was interesting to speculate if theoretical extra-terrestrial languages may follow similar rules.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Given the remarkable linguistic coincidences across unrelated human languages, with Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese, Gaelic, Hawaiian, English, Hungarian, Chinese and loads of others sharing identical or very similar words (check out the lists at the link below), would it be reasonable to predict that, if we ever do make contact with a sapient alien species capable of vocal communication, some of their vocabulary to describe the fundamental basics of life, may not be unfamiliar to us?

https://johanna-hypatia.livejournal.com/176105.html
Click to expand...
Only if the aliens had been here before and were able to successfully communicate with humans in one of the ancient languages.
 
New language discovered in a Hittite cultic text.

The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC).

Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbors.

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise: Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Professor Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Prof. Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

https://phys.org/news/2023-09-indo-european-language-excavation-turkey.html
 
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