Hurrian language - Definition and Overview

Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians, a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC.

Hurrian is an agglutinative language which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European language families. Together with Urartian, it comprises the Hurro-Urartian family. Some scholars see similarities between Hurrian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place it in the Alarodian languages family.

Some scholars, like I. J. Gelb & E. A. Speiser, believe that the Hurrians were later arrivals who assimilated or were assimilated by a Subarian substratum, and view the term "Hurrian language" as anachronistic.