CARIAN LANGUAGE

ancient language spoken in the southernmost area of western Anatolia. The language is known primarily from the more than 100 Carian graffiti that were left by Carian mercenaries who served in Egypt. Clay tablets and monumental inscriptions in the language have also been found in Caria since World War II. Carian appears to be written in an alphabetic script. Not enough is known of the language as yet for it to be definitely classified, although some scholars assume that it belongs to the Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family.