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The Hittites were one of the many nations that spoke the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Hittite language was related to Luwian and Palaic, and possibly to later languages such asLydian, Lycian, and Carian. Unlike Luwian, which had an indigenous writing system, Hittite adopted theAkkadian cuneiform to write their language. Approximately 375 cuneiform signs were adopted from Akkadian cuneiform. As in Akkadian, signs can be roughly categorized into phonograms, logograms, and determinatives.

Phonograms are signs used for their phonetic values. They can be a single vowel, a consonant followed by a vowel, or a vowel followed by a consonant. The following is the set of phonetic signs used in Hittite cuneiform.

Note that in the transliteration scheme, /z/ stands for the affricate sound [ts], where as /š/ can actually stand for both [s] and [š].

Hittite also adopted the spelling conventions that Akkadian employed in order to write syllables ending in a consonant, which is to write the syllable as two signs, the first sign a CV phonogram with the starting consonant and the vowel (or just a V phonogram if the word starts with a vowel), followed by the second sign a VC phonogram with the same vowel again followed by the ending consonant.

The following is an example of how isolated consonants are written. Note that the red text is the Hittite transliteration, the purple text is the phonetic representation, and the blue text is the English meaning.

To write consonant clusters, either a CV or VC sign is written used but its vowel is "silent" so that only the consonantal value is pronounced. Depending on the structure of the consonant cluster, the phonogram with the suppressed vowel can precede or follow a fully pronounced phonogram containing the vowel of the syllable.

In addition to phonograms, Hittite also employed a number of logograms. Many phonograms also serve as logograms, and many logograms have multiple meanings as well. This phenomenon is known as polyvalence, and it existed in all cuneiform scripts from as far back as Sumerian. Because the system is adopted from Akkadian, which in turn was adopted from Sumerian, two types of logograms exist in Hittite.Sumerograms are signs adopted from Sumerian, and in Akkadian they already served as logograms. In constract, Akkadograms ar