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When did scholars recognize Hittite as an Indo-European language?

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Map of ancient Anatolia and northern Syria showing the geographic distribution of Anatolian languages, including Hittite, Hattian, Lydian, Phrygian, Palaic, Carian, Lycian, Pisidian, Hurrian, and Urartean. Major historical sites such as Hattusa, Kanesh, and Ugarit are marked, with the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea bordering the region. — Anatolian languages Distribution of the Anatolian languages.

Scholars officially recognized Hittite as an Indo-European language in 1915, when the archaeologist and linguist Bedřich Hrozný published his findings.12

While the Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon had previously suspected an Indo-European affinity in certain cuneiform letters from the Tell el-Amarna archive as early as 1902, this remained an unconfirmed hypothesis at the time. Hrozný’s definitive conclusion was reached during World War I following his analysis of the thousands of cuneiform tablets unearthed between 1906 and 1912 at the Hittite capital of Hattusa. His work demonstrated that the language’s noun declensions and verbal conjugations—such as specific nominative and accusative endings and 3rd-person verb forms—shared clear structural similarities with other early Indo-European languages.321