Urartian or Vannic[1] is an extinct Hurro-Urartian language which was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu (Biaini or Biainili in Urartian), which was centered on the region around Lake Van and had its capital, Tushpa, near the site of the modern town of Van in the Armenian highlands, now in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey.

[9] Urartian is an ergative, agglutinative language, which belongs to the Hurro-Urartian family, whose only other known member is Hurrian.

The closeness holds especially true of the so-called Old Hurrian dialect, known above all from Hurro-Hittite bilingual texts.

[16][17][18] Surviving texts of the language are written in a variant of the cuneiform script called Neo-Assyrian.

[20] Schulz's drawings, published posthumously in 1840 in the Journal Asiatique,[21] were crucial in forwarding the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform by Edward Hincks.

[20][better source needed] Decipherment only made progress after World War I, with the discovery of Urartian-Assyrian bilingual inscriptions at Kelišin and Topzawä.

The oldest recorded texts originate from the reign of Sarduri I, from the late 9th century BCE.

Approximately two hundred inscriptions written in the Urartian language, which adopted and modified the cuneiform script, have been discovered to date.

The sign gi 𒄀 has the special function of expressing a hiatus, e.g. u-gi-iš-ti for Uīšdi.

It remains unclear whether the symbols in question form a coherent writing system, or represent just a multiplicity of uncoordinated expressions of proto-writing or ad-hoc drawings.

[27] What can be identified with a certain confidence are two symbols or "hieroglyphs" found on vessels, representing certain units of measurement: for aqarqi and for ṭerusi.

Contrasting the last example with Urartian ṭu-uš-pa- ‘Tushpa (toponym)’ ↦ Armenian Տոսպ Tosp, Hachikian (2010) reconstructs an “emphasis” distinction in the bilabial position.

The cuneiform signs usually transliterated with ‹s, z, ṣ› were not fricatives, but affricates, as again shown by loans in Armenian.

It possibly may have been ejectivization or glottalization /pʼ, tʼ, t͡sʼ, kʼ/ as in Semitic languages of the time and the nearby endemic languages of the Caucasus, or just plain unaspirated (and unvoiced) /p⁼, t⁼, t͡s⁼, k⁼/ as in Armenian, in either case, contrasting fully with the respective aspirated /pʰ, tʰ, t͡sʰ, kʰ/ and voiced /b, d, d͡z, g/ series.

For a phonemic /ɣ/ distinct from /x/, there is limited evidence from the Greek rendering of the toponym Κομμαγηνή Kommagēnḗ ‘Commagene’ for Urartian qu-ma-ḫa-; thus, /x/ and /ɣ/ were not orthograpically distinguished.

The script distinguishes the vowels a, e, i and u. Hachikian believes that there was an /o/ as well, as reflected in loans such as the rendition of Urartian ṭu-uš-pa- ‘Tushpa (toponym)’ as Armenian Տոսպ Tosp and Greek Θοσπ- Thosp-.

The valency markers are -a- (rarely -i-) for intransitivity and -u- for transitivity: for example nun-a-də "I came" vs šidišt-u-nə "he built".

The following chart lists the currently ascertained endings, along with gaps for those not yet ascertained (the ellipsis marks the place of the valency vowel): Examples: ušt-a-də "I marched forth"; nun-a-bə "he came"; aš-u-bə "I put-it in"; šidišt-u-nə "he built-it"; ar-u-mə "he gave [it] to me", kuy-it-u-nə "they dedicated-it".

The encoding of the person of the absolutive subject/object is present, even though it is also explicitly mentioned in the sentence: e.g. argište-šə inə arə šu-nə "Argišti established(-it) this granary".

An exceptional verb is man- "to be", in that it has a transitive valency vowel, and takes no absolutive suffix for the third person singular: man-u "it was" vs man-u-lə "they were".

An optative form, also regularly used in clauses introduced with ašə "when", is constructed by -l- followed by -ə (-i in non-reduced form) - the following absolutive person suffix is optional, and the ergative subject is apparently not signalled at all: e.g. qapqar-u-l-i-nə "I wanted to besiege-it [the city]", urp-u-l-i-nə or urp-u-l-ə "he shall slaughter".

Participles from intransitive verbs are formed with the suffix -urə, added to the root, and have an active meaning (e.g. ušt-u-rə "who has marched forth").

Participles from transitive verbs are formed with the suffix -aurə, and have a passive meaning (e.g. šidaurə "which is built").

The word order is usually verb-final, and, more specifically, SOV (where S refers to the ergative agent), but the rule is not rigid and components are occasionally re-arranged for expressive purposes.

For example, names of gods are often placed first, even though they are in oblique cases: Ḫaldi-ə ewri-ə inə E2 Argište-šə Menuaḫini-šə šidišt-u-nə "For Ḫaldi the lord Argišti, son of Menua, built this temple."

Verbs can be placed sentence-initially in vivid narratives: ušt-a-də Mana-idə ebanə at-u-bə "Forth I marched towards Mana, and I consumed the land.

"URUḫu-ra-di-na-ku-ú-niḪuradinaku=nə...…a-ru-ni-ear=u=nədḫal-di-šeḪaldi=šəDIŠme-i-nu-ú-aMenua=əDIŠiš-pu-u-i-ni-e-ḫi-ni-eIšpuini=ḫi=ni=ə.URUḫu-ra-di-na-ku-ú-ni ... a-ru-ni-e dḫal-di-še DIŠme-i-nu-ú-a DIŠiš-pu-u-i-ni-e-ḫi-ni-eḪuradinaku=nə … ar=u=nə Ḫaldi=šə Menua=ə Išpuini=ḫi=ni=ə.Haldi gave (the city of) Huradinaku to Menua, son of Ishpuini.

"Diakonoff (1985)[37] and Greppin (1991)[38] present etymologies of several Old Armenian words as having a possible Hurro-Urartian origin.

Contemporary linguists, such as Hrach Martirosyan, have rejected many of the Hurro-Urartian origins for these words and instead suggest native Armenian etymologies, leaving the possibility that these words may have been loaned into Hurro-Urartian from Armenian, and not vice versa.

[39] Arnaud Fournet, Hrach Martirosyan, and Armen Petrosyan propose additional borrowed words of Armenian origin loaned into Urartian and vice versa, including grammatical words and parts of speech, such as Urartian "eue" ("and"), attested in the earliest Urartian texts and likely a loan from Armenian (compare to Armenian "ew" (եւ), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁epi).