Urartian language - Definition and Overview

Urartian is the conventional name for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in Northeast Anatolia (present Turkey), in the region of Lake Van.

Urartian was an agglutinative language, which belongs neither to the Semitic nor to the Indo-European families. It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. The Urartians also possessed a native hieroglyphic script, but in later Urartu this script was restricted to use in accounting and religion.

Based on linguistic similarities with Northeast Caucasian languages, some scholars place it in the Alarodian family, as one of the two languages in the Hurro-Urartian sub-family. There is also possibly a connection between Urartian and the modern Georgian language.