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In discussing the languages Tolkien invented, it is necessary to consider two aspects: their "primary world" history, namely their literal development by Tolkien as a linguist, and their "secondary world" history, namely their imagined historical development in the history of Middle-earth.
Tolkien was a professional linguist and a specialist in the Old English language. He was also interested in many languages outside his field and developed a particular love for the Finnish language (he described the finding of a Finnish grammar book as "entering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before", The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, number 214).
Finnish morphology (particularly its rich system of inflection) in part gave rise to Quenya. Another of Tolkien's favorites was Welsh — and features of Welsh phonology found their way to SindarinSindarin is an artificial language (or conlang) developed by J. In Tolkien's mythos, it was the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the El. Numerous words were borrowed from existing languages, but less and less obviously as Tolkien progressed, so that attempts to match a source to a particular Elvish word or name in works published during his lifetime are often very dubious.
Language-making was Tolkien's hobby for most of his life. He is known to have constructed his first languages (Animalic and Nevbosh) at a little over thirteen and he continued to ponder upon his creations up until his death more than sixty-five years later. Language invention had always been tightly connected to the mythology that Tolkien developed, as he found that a language could not be complete without the history of the people who spoke it, just as these people could never be fully realistic if imagined only through the EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil and as speaking English. Tolkien therefore took the stance of a translator and adaptor rather than that of the original author of his works.
Although the ElvishThe Elves (always spelt such, never "Elfs") are one of the races that appear in the work of J. Their complex history is described in full only in The Silmarillion and it is mentioned tangentially in The Lord of the Rings''. Elves were the first inhabitant languages SindarinSindarin is an artificial language (or conlang) developed by J. In Tolkien's mythos, it was the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the El and Quenya are the most famous and the most mature languages of those that Tolkien invented for his mythology, they are by no means the only ones. They belong to a family of Elvish dialects, that originate in Common EldarinMiddle-earth languages In J. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, Common Eldarin is the primordial tongue of the Eldar, those Elves who left for Valinor. Common Eldarin split off Primitive Quendian, the original language of all Quendi, or Elves, the language common to all EldarEldar" is the name J. Tolkien in his fictional universe of Middle-earth gave to those of the Elves that accepted the summons of Orome. See Sundering of the Elves. The name was borrowed by Games Workshop for an elf-like race of humanoids., which in turn originates in Primitive QuendianMiddle-earth languages In J. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth, Primitive Quendian is the primordial tongue of the Quendi or Elves, which they spoke soon after their Awakening. Primitive Quendian split into Common Eldarin and the many Avari lan, the common root of EldarEldar" is the name J. Tolkien in his fictional universe of Middle-earth gave to those of the Elves that accepted the summons of Orome. See Sundering of the Elves. The name was borrowed by Games Workshop for an elf-like race of humanoids.in and Avarin languages. In addition to that, there is a separate language family that is spoken by Men, the most prominent member of which was Westron (derived from the Númenorean speech Adûnaic) or the "Common speech" of the peoples of The Lord of the Rings. Most Mannish tongues showed influences by Elvish, as well as some Dwarvish influences. Several independent languages were drafted as well, for example the Khuzdul language of the Dwarves. Other languages are Valarin (the tongue of the Valar), and the Black Speech created by Sauron during the Second Age.
Sindarin and Quenya are often written in the tengwar script, which Tolkien especially devised for them, or alternatively in the rune-like cirth. When Middle-earth languages are written with the Latin alphabet, either acute accents (á, é, í, ó, ú) or circumflex accents (â, ê, î, ô, û, y) mark long vowels depending on language or other convention. The diaeresis (ä, ë, ö) is normally used to mark that a short vowel is to be separately pronounced, that it is not silent or part of a diphthong. For example, the last four letters of Ainulindalë should be sounded as if spelled dah-leh in English rather than as dale and the first three letters of Eärendil represent something like eh-ahr rather than the English word ear. (But occasionally, especially when writing proto-Eldarin forms, Tolkien used the macron to indicate long vowels and the dieresis on ä, ö, and ü as in German to indicate i-modification or e-modifcation.)
In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien adopted the literary device of claiming to have replaced the original Westron with English. This device of rendering an imaginary language with a real language he carried further, rendering Rohirric, related to an older form of Westron, by Old English, and names in the tongue of Dale in the north of Rhovanion by Old Norse forms, thus mapping the genetic relation of his fictional languages on the existing historical relations of the Germanic languages. A natural consequence of this is that the languages thus replaced were never worked out by Tolkien in any detail because they never appeared in the texts.
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