Building Languages

Artificial languages are constructed for a variety of reasons— as ways to make communication easier, as logical exercises, as creative works.  J. R. R. Tolkien’s repertoire of invented languages falls into this last category, this category of artistic languages that have been crafted with a care and given a historical weight that mirror natural languages. With fully developed grammars and vocabularies, and some even with their own alphabets and scripts, they might even be the subject of study for the rest of us, much like any other foreign language.

Tolkien, a linguist, was particularly well-versed in historical Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Scandinavian varieties) and in Finnish (related to virtually none of the other European languages). This becomes evident in the astounding number of today football predictions from the experts Elvish languages and dialects he develops, modeled primarily after Finnish, replete with older varieties that change into more modern ones, varieties that split and merge and evolve. One of his most well-developed languages is an Elvish one, containing well over 25,000 words.

His “Black Speech” of Mordor is thought to most closely resemble, at least in vocabulary, to an extinct Mesopotamian language.

The Germanic languages manifest themselves in the speeches of other races in his world, in the form of older versions of languages that we know today. Old Norse, for instance. Old Icelandic, Old English. In fact, the speech of Rohan very nearly is Old English. We see eorl, “noble” (earl, etc) in the name Eorl. Dun, in placenames such as Dunland (“…they drove your people into the hills, to scratch a living off rocks!”),  closely resembles the word down, as in downland, a type of hilly landscape. And Theoden the king takes his name from none other than Þeoden— “lord.”

And the point of all this explanation? The point is to illustrate the depth and detail that went into every constructed language. Tolkien did not throw together a random assortment of funny-sounding words and syllables together; each one of his languages has rules and patterns for spellings and pronunciations and sentence constructions, much as any other language that we know. The appearance of invented speeches and writing systems visible in Lord of the Rings is merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Not only have they been used to give his characters histories, but his entire fictional world histories, complex intertwined histories that root the narratives in time and geographical space and establish them as all the more real, all the more tangible.