Conlangs

Adûnaic

The language of Númenor, the lost continent of Atlantis.

Avarin

A separate language family from Eldarin (which contains all the other Elvish tongues covered here), Avarin is almost completely unexplored. If you ever wanted to derive your own Elvish language, you can invent an Avarin tongue, descended from Primitive Elvish.

Black Speech

A dark language for dark deeds. A language to rhyme rings of power in.

Doriathrin

The native tongue of Lúthien Tinúviel, the elf-maid who loved a mortal. Possible dialect of Ilkorin.

Elvish

Elvish is the common term for the family of languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings and other works. The movies and books primarily feature Quenya and Sindarin. Other Elvish languages include Avarin, Doriathrin, Ilkorin, Nandorin, Primitive Elvish, Qenya (precursor to Quenya), Telerin and Valarin.

Entish

The language of the Ents of Middle Earth. "It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it."

Ilkorin

Possibly a language family within North Sindarin, a leading dialect of North Sindarin or a separate Eldarin language altogether.

Khuzdul

The secret language of the Dwarves. Oh, Balin, we hardly knew ye.

Mannish

Some of the less important human languages of Tolkien's world. Contrast Adûnaic and Westron.

Naffarin

The first of Tolkien's constructed languages for which we have any information, though even that is sparse. But it already foreshadows Quenya.

Nandorin

The Green-elven tongue of Middle Earth.

Old Sindarin

Primitive Quendian begat Common Eldarin. Common Eldarin begat Common Lindarin. Common Lindarin begat Old Sindarin. Old Sindarin begat (Classical) Sindarin. Helge writes, "Old Sindarin preserves the general sound of archaic Elvish much better than Sindarin does. There are quite a few cases of Old Sindarin words being identical to Quenya words."

Primitive Elvish

Begun as Proto-Elfin in 1915 by J.R.R. Tolkien, Primitive Elvish is the language that over time (in his fictional world) evolved into his many other Elvish languages. Primitive Elvish is divided into two stages: Primitive Quendian and Common Eldarin (the language of the Eldar as distinct from the Avari).

Qenya

In 1915, Tolkien began his first attempt at a High-Elven language: Qenya. It is almost an entirely different language than Quenya as used in The Lord of the Rings (which, after all, was not published until almost 40 years later).

Quenya

Descended from Primitive Elvish, Quenya is the chief of Tolkien's Elvish languages, used mainly in The Lord of The Rings and The Silmarillion. The beauty of Quenya has inspired many to take up the hobby of model languages. Unfortunately, it was never a primary goal of Tolkien's to finish the design of Quenya, and his death left the vocabulary and grammar incomplete. This incompleteness has dampened the fires of enthusiasm for many who would have liked to have learned the language. At present there exists no single authoritative reference to the meta-history (the history of the creation of the fictional history) of Quenya. This gap will be filled eventually, when some unknown among us rises to the challenge of analyzing the editorial efforts of Tolkien's son, who has prepared a series of volumes relating the history of Tolkien's invention of Middle Earth. [Since I first wrote that in 1995, Helge Kåre Fauskanger has come close to achieving this.]

Sindarin

The tongue of the Grey-Elves, itself descended from Old Sindarin and from Primitive Elvish, which is also the ancestor language to Quenya.

Telerin

The language of the Sea-Elves.

Valarin

The tongue of the Valar, the angelic spirits who inspire the stories of The Silmarillion.

Westron

The Common Speech of men, dwarves and hobbits, and the original language of the fictional manuscript to The Lord of the Rings. While it was derived from Adûnaic, Tolkien never specified the exact relationship between the languages.

Up to Conlang Index

19 languages listed.
Updated on January 11, 2005 at 8:14 AM (GMT-5).