The Leleges ware one of the aboriginal peoples of southwest Anatolia (compare "Pelasgians"), who were already there when the Indo-European Hellenes emerged.

The Leleges were a distinct Anatolian tribe according to Homer but Leleges were an early name for the Carians, according to Herodotus; they were overcome by the Carians, according to the fourth-century BCE historian Philippus of Theangela, On Carians and Leleges, who suggested connections of the Leleges also in Messenia, in mainland Greece.It is thought that the name Leleges is not an autonym, a name these people applied to themselves, in a long-submerged tongue.

Instead, during the Bronze Age the term lulahi was in use in the Luwian language of the Hittites in Anatolia: in a Hittite cuneiform inscription priests and temple servants are directed to avoid conversing with lulahi and foreign merchants.

It is surmised that the reference is to strangers.

According to the suggestion of Vitaly Shevoroshkin, applying the term to men of the lands that would become classical Caria and Lycia, "Leleges" would then be an attempt to transliterate lulahi into Greek.Late traditions reported in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke, and by Pausanias, derive the name from an eponymous king Lelex; a comparable etymology, memorializing a legendary founder, is provided by Greek mythographers for virtually every tribe of Hellenes.