The English philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created several constructed languages, mostly related to his fictional world of Middle-earth. Inventing languages, something that he called glossopoeia (paralleling his idea of mythopoeia or myth-making), was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens.

Tolkien's glossopoeia has two temporal dimensions: the internal (fictional) timeline of events in Middle-earth described in The Silmarillion and other writings, and the external timeline of Tolkien's own life during which he often revised and refined his languages and their fictional history. Tolkien scholars have published a substantial volume of Tolkien's linguistic material in the History of Middle-earth books, and the Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon journals. Scholars such as Carl F. Hostetter, David Salo and Elizabeth Solopova have published grammars and studies of the languages.

He created a large family of Elvish languages, the best-known and most developed being Quenya and Sindarin. In addition, he sketched in the Mannish languages of Adûnaic and Rohirric; the Dwarvish language of Khuzdul; the Entish language; and the Black Speech, in the fiction a constructed language enforced on the Orcs by the Dark Lord Sauron. Tolkien supplemented his languages with several scripts.

Context

Tolkien's hobby: glossopoeia

Tolkien was a professional philologist of ancient Germanic languages, specialising in Old English. Glossopoeia, the construction of languages, was Tolkien's hobby for most of his life.

One of the first constructed languages Tolkien encountered was "Animalic", invented by his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon. The language mainly used animal names, for example "Dog nightingale woodpecker forty" translated to "You are an ass". Tolkien's name in Animalic was "Otter". He learned a bit of it, but was not fluent in Animalic. Together with Mary, Tolkien invented Nevbosh, a sound substitution cypher known, 'new nonsense', based on English with French and Latin borrowings, which grew to include some elements of actual invented language. Tolkien stated that this was not his first effort in invented languages. Shortly thereafter, he developed a true invented language called Naffarin, which used Latin and Spanish elements. One of his early projects was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by the people of Beowulf in the Germanic Heroic Age.Tolkien's name for himself in Gautistk was Undarhruiménitupp. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War. p. 17. Andrew Higgins, In Dembith Pengoldh A column on Tolkien's invented languages

Tolkien was well aware of Esperanto, from c. 1907-1911, when he used it in one of his notebooks. In 1931, he gave a lecture about his passion for constructed languages, titled A Secret Vice. Here he contrasts his project of artistic languages constructed for aesthetic pleasure with the pragmatism of international auxiliary languages. In Secret Vice, he noted that he "particularly like Esperanto, not least because it is the creation ultimately of one man, not a philologist, and is therefore something like a 'human language bereft of the inconveniences due to too many successive cooks' - which is as good a description of the ideal artificial language (in a particular sense) as I can give." The lecture also discusses Tolkien's views on phonaesthetics, citing Greek, Finnish, and Welsh as examples of "languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form". Part of the lecture was published in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays; in the part that was not, Tolkien gave the example of "Fonwegian", a language with "no connection whatever with any other known language".

In 1932, Tolkien became a member of the Board of Honorary Advisers to the Education Committee of the British Esperanto Association, even though he was not an active Esperantist and admitted himself that he did not speak or read Esperanto, but only learned its grammar 25 years ago. Nevertheless, Tolkien wrote an article for the British Esperantist, titled "A Philologist on Esperanto". There, while writing positively about Esperanto, he criticized another constructed language, Novial, describing it as "hideous", a "factory product ... made of spare parts".

The latest mention of Esperanto by Tolkien was in a 1956 letter; he became much more critical of universal constructed languages, writing that:

Being a skilled calligrapher, Tolkien invented scripts for his languages.Hammond, Wayne G., Scull, Christina, J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, p. 190. The scripts included Sarati, Cirth, and Tengwar.

Tolkien's theory of invented languages

Tolkien was of the opinion that the invention of an artistic language in order to be convincing and pleasing must include not only the language's historical development, but also the history of its speakers, and especially the mythology associated with both the language and the speakers. It was this idea that an "Elvish language" must be associated with a complex history and mythology of the Elves that was at the core of the development of Tolkien's legendarium.

Tolkien wrote in one of his letters:

The Tolkien scholar and folklorist Dimitra Fimi questions this claim. In particular, his September 1914 The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star, based on the Old English poem Crist 1, shows that he was starting to think about a mythology before he started to sketch his first invented Middle-earth language, Qenya, in March 1915. Further, the steps that led to his first attempt at the mythology, the 1917 draft of The Book of Lost Tales, involving the character of Earendel in its first story, did not involve his invented languages. Tolkien was, rather, in Fimi's view, emphasizing that language and myth "began to flow together when I was an undergraduate [at Oxford, 1911–1915]" (as Tolkien wrote in 1954), and stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Lhammas

In 1937, Tolkien wrote the Lhammas, a linguistic treatise addressing the relationships of the languages spoken in Middle-earth during the First Age, principally the Elvish languages. The text purports to be a translation of an Elvish work, written by one Pengolodh, whose historical works are presented as being the main source of the narratives in The Silmarillion concerning the First Age.

The Lhammas exists in three versions, the shortest one being called the Lammasathen. The main linguistic thesis in this text is that the languages of Middle-earth are all descended from the language of the Valar (the "gods"), Valarin, and divided into three branches:

Oromëan, named after Oromë, who taught the first Elves to speak. All languages of Elves and most languages of Men are Oromëan. Aulëan, named after Aulë, maker of the Dwarves, is the origin of the Khuzdul language. It has had some influences on the tongues of Men. Melkian, named after the rebellious Melkor or Morgoth, is the origin in the First Age of the many tongues used by the Orcs and other evil beings.

Middle-earth languages

Elvish

Internal and external histories

Internally, in the fiction, the Elvish language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language.

Externally, in Tolkien's life, he constructed the family from around 1910, working on it up to his death in 1973. He constructed the grammar and vocabulary of at least fifteen languages and dialects in roughly three periods:

Early, 1910 – : most of the proto-language Primitive Quendian, Common Eldarin, Quenya, and Goldogrin Mid: : Goldogrin changed into Noldorin, joined by Telerin, Ilkorin, Doriathrin and Avarin Late: Ilkorin and Doriathrin disappeared; Noldorin matured into Sindarin.

Tolkien worked out much of the etymological background of his Elvish languages during the 1930s, resulting in The Etymologies.

Quenya

Tolkien based Quenya pronunciation more on Latin than on Finnish, though it has elements derived from both languages. Thus, Quenya lacks the vowel harmony and consonant gradation present in Finnish, and accent is not always on the first syllable of a word. Typical Finnish elements like the front vowels ö, ä and y are lacking in Quenya, but phonological similarities include the absence of aspirated unvoiced stops or the development of the syllables ti > si in both languages. The combination of a Latin basis with Finnish phonological rules resulted in a product that resembles Italian in many respects, which was Tolkien's favourite modern Romance language.

Quenya grammar is agglutinative and mostly suffixing, i.e. different word particles are joined by appending them. It has basic word classes of verbs, nouns and pronouns/determiners, adjectives and prepositions. Nouns are inflected for case and number. Verbs are inflected for tense and aspect, and for agreement with subject and object. In early Quenya, adjectives agree with the noun they modify in case and number; in later Quenya, this agreement disappears. The basic word order is subject–verb–object.

Sindarin

A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna míriel o menel aglar elenath! Start of the Sindarin poem"A Elbereth Gilthoniel"

Tolkien wrote that he gave Sindarin "a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh ... because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers".

Unlike Quenya, Sindarin is mainly a fusional language with some analytic tendencies. It can be distinguished from Quenya by the rarity of vowel endings, and the use of voiced plosives b d g, which are rare in Quenya and found only after nasals and liquids. Early Sindarin formed plurals by the addition of -ī, which vanished but affected the preceding vowels (as in Welsh and Old English): S. , pl. , S. , pl. Yrch. Sindarin forms plurals in multiple ways.

Mannish

Adûnaic and Westron

Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean), the language spoken in Númenor, shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings, but before he wrote the linguistic background of the Appendices. Adûnaic is intended as the language from which Westron (also called Adûni) is derived; Westron became the lingua franca for all the peoples of Middle-earth: This added a depth of historical development to the Mannish languages. Adûnaic was intended to have a "faintly Semitic flavour".Sauron Defeated, p. 240 Its development began with The Notion Club Papers (written in 1945). It is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern-day) protagonists, Lowdham, of that story in a visionary dream of Atlantis. Its grammar is sketched in the unfinished "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language".

Tolkien remained undecided whether the language of the Men of Númenor should be derived from the original Mannish language (as in Adûnaic), or if it should be derived from "the Elvish Noldorin" (i.e. Quenya) instead., p. 63. In The Lost Road and Other Writings, it is implied that the Númenóreans spoke Quenya, and that Sauron, hating all things Elvish, taught the Númenóreans the old Mannish tongue they themselves had forgotten., p. 68 and note p. 75.

Rohirric

Tolkien called the language of Rohan "Rohanese". He only gave a few actual Rohirric words:

Kûd-dûkan, an old word meaning "hole-dweller", which evolved to kuduk, the name the Hobbits had for themselves