Dwarves, Orcs and Men

Quenya and Sindarin get most of the attention, but Middle-earth has other peoples with other tongues. This chapter looks at Khuzdul, the Black Speech, Adûnaic and the Common Speech: what each is meant to be like, what survives, and how Tolkien used the sound of each to say something about the people who speak it.

Khuzdul: The Secret Tongue of the Dwarves

In the story, the Dwarves guarded Khuzdul as a secret and shared only place names and a few phrases with outsiders. The Elvish chronicles make it a language with no known relatives, said to have been devised by the Vala Aulë, who made the Dwarves. Tolkien began developing it around 1935, before The Hobbit was published.

• Design: built mainly on Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Tolkien said the Dwarves' words were "constructed to be Semitic".
• Roots: words are made from three-consonant roots, as in Hebrew and Arabic, with vowel patterns changing the meaning.
• Grammar known: singular and plural nouns, a construct state and some case endings. Only four verbs are known.

That the Dwarves hide Khuzdul is more than a story point: it explains why Tolkien needed to publish so little of it.

The Black Speech

The Black Speech was made by Sauron as the one language of his servants. It never fully took: it influenced the Orcs' vocabulary but split into Orkish dialects that the Orcs could not always understand, and by the end of the Third Age they spoke mostly a debased form of the Common Speech.

• Design: intended to be consistent and agglutinative, with harsh sounds such as sh, gh and zg.
• Attitude: Tolkien disliked it. It exists mainly as the Ring inscription, which Chapter 4 read.
• Words known: ash "one", nazg "ring", burzum "darkness", -ishi "in"; verb stems durb- "constrain, dominate", gimb- "seek out", thrak- "bring by force", krimp- "bind"; also uruk "orc", snaga "slave", ghâsh "fire", Lugbúrz "Dark Tower".

The name Nazgûl combines nazg "ring" and gûl "wraith": "ring-wraith". One scholar has suggested that Tolkien drew on Hurrian, a real ancient language that was also agglutinative; the article presents this only as a proposal.

Adûnaic: The Language of Númenor

Adûnaic was devised shortly after the Second World War, and appears in The Notion Club Papers, a story Tolkien wrote around 1945. It was meant to have a "faintly Semitic flavour" and to be the source of Westron. The most developed piece is a report on its sounds and word forms, which breaks off before saying much about verbs.

Most nouns are built on three-consonant roots, as in Khuzdul, which is why the two languages feel related in design even though they belong to different peoples.

Westron: The Language You Read

The Common Speech, called Westron, is the everyday language of nearly all the peoples of the west outside the Elves. Because the books present themselves as translated from an old record, the reader meets Westron as ordinary English, and the Rohirric speech of Rohan as Old English (Chapter 2). The reader meets the "other" languages by contrast.

Hands-On Exercises