Adunaic

Adûnaic is the one language in Númenor that nobody had to learn. Quenya was known to scholars and written in documents; Sindarin was spoken in the north-west and in the great houses; but Adûnaic was the native speech of the Númenóreans, the tongue of Men they had brought with them from Beleriand. Outside the Sindarin-speaking regions it was simply what people said, and almost everyone knew some Sindarin besides.

Its ancestry runs back to the First Age. In the house of Hador in Dor-lómin only Elvish was spoken, yet the people's own language was kept — and from it came the common speech of Númenor. The tongue of the House of Bëor was related but phonetically different, and in some western districts of the island that Bëorian variety survived as a dialect. Two words of a related First-Age speech are recorded, and they are enough to hear it: Felagund was called Nóm, wisdom, by Bëor's people, who were themselves called Nómin, the wise; and Bëor was not a personal name at all but their word for vassal.

The language was never wholly its own. Its ancestor was in part derived from an older stage of Elvish, and there was a theory — held to be likely — that the speech of the leading Atani group had been influenced in prehistoric times by Khuzdul, the tongue of the Dwarves. Both threads are visible in the vocabulary. Adûn in Adûnakhôr belongs to the Elvish root ndu, down, from on high; Anadûnê itself is expressly called a loan from Eldarin. Even the defiant Ar- of the later kings' names is built on the Elvish stem ar(a)-, high, noble, royal. The kings who abolished the Elven-tongues named themselves with Elvish material.

Númenor was a place where things had two names as a matter of course. All the lords of the Númenóreans bore Eldarin names beside their own, and so did their cities and their lands. The island is Elenna and Númenórë in Elvish and Anadûnê, Westernesse, in Adûnaic. Eärendil's ship is Vingilot in Elvish and Rothinzil in Adûnaic, both meaning foam-flower — and that pairing is older than Númenor, since it is already recorded of the ship itself. Official place-names on the island were Quenya, but beside them stood local names, usually of the same meaning, in Sindarin or Adûnaic.

Of the language itself the published narrative preserves very little. One common noun is translated in the main work: pharaz, gold, which stands in the name Ar-Pharazôn. The spelling conventions of Appendix E treat Adûnaic as a foreign tongue on purpose — k and kh are used in non-Elvish names, where kh represents the same sound as ch, as in Adûnakhôr; ph stands for f; and the circumflex, which in Sindarin marks a specially long vowel, has no such force here. It simply marks the word as belonging to another language, exactly as the k does. The Silmarillion adds the plain rule: in Adûnaic, as in Khuzdul, the circumflex means a long vowel and nothing more.

For most of Númenor's history the two tongues coexisted without trouble: the people used their own language, the kings and lords knew the Elven-tongue as well. What changed was not the languages but what they were taken to mean. The shift can be dated step by step, and the steps are small.

Under Tar-Calmacil the royal name was for the first time pronounced in Adûnaic: the King's Men called him Ar-Belzagar. His successor Tar-Ardamin was likewise called Ar-Abattârik. Neither had yet taken the sceptre under an Adûnaic title — that was Ar-Adûnakhôr, the twentieth king, and his chosen title meant Lord of the West. To the Faithful it was worse than a break with custom: that title had belonged to one of the Valar. Even so, an old dread held, and the Roll of Kings recorded his name in the Quenya form Herunúmen anyway. Two kings later Ar-Gimilzôr forbade the use of the Elven-tongues altogether and moved the Faithful, who lived mostly in the west of the island, into the east. The linguistic split had become a geographical one.

The last use of the language in that quarrel was against a person. Míriel, daughter of Tar-Palantir and rightful heir, was taken by Ar-Pharazôn and renamed Ar-Zimraphel. A name in one's own language, imposed by force on someone who had another. And at the very end, the survivors on the shores of Middle-earth gave the drowned land a name in the same tongue: Akallabêth, the Downfallen — Atalantë in the Elvish speech, the same word twice over. It is the one place in the published histories where an Adûnaic word is spoken by people in the narrative rather than merely listed.

Númenor can be described by its languages as accurately as by its coasts. In the north-west, settled mainly by people of Bëorian descent who had given up their own tongue in Beleriand, Sindarin was in general use; in Andúnië and the Westlands high and low spoke it alike. Everywhere else Adûnaic was the mother tongue of the people, though almost everyone knew some Sindarin. In the royal house and most noble and learned houses, Sindarin was the ordinary cradle-speech down to the days of Tar-Atanamir. Quenya was spoken nowhere. Three languages, and only one of them belonged to the whole island.

That map explains the politics that followed. When the King's Men turned against the Elven-tongues, they were not attacking a foreign import but the speech of their own aristocracy — and when Ar-Gimilzôr moved the Faithful from the west of the island to the east, he was moving the Sindarin-speaking regions away from the sea road to Eressëa. The quarrel over which language a king should be named in was, at bottom, a quarrel about which half of Númenor the throne belonged to.

One further name belongs on this map, and it is not in Gondor. Some names of the realm — Umbar, Arnach, Erech, Eilenach, Rimmon, Forlong — are neither Elvish nor Adûnaic. They come from before the Númenóreans arrived, and Appendix F says so plainly. A country whose official names are Quenya, whose people spoke a tongue descended from Adûnaic and whose oldest place-names belong to neither is not a tidy linguistic unit. It is a place where three histories are still audible at once.

Adûnaic did not die with the island. In Pelargir it went on being spoken, and mingled with words from lesser Men it became the Common Speech, which spread from there along the coasts among all who had dealings with Westernesse. Every line of dialogue in The Lord of the Rings is, by the conceit of the book, a translation out of a language descended from the tongue of Númenor. The Westron kept in Gondor was of a graver and more antique cast — a remnant of that descent.

The kinship reaches further north than Gondor. The languages of the Beornings, the Woodmen, the Men of Dale and the Rohirrim are related to Adûnaic, because their speakers descend from the Edain or from their close kin. What looks on the map like a scattering of unrelated peoples is, in the language, one family.

There is a bitter turn in the late writings. Among the Faithful who ruled the coastlands from Lune to Pelargir, the old Adûnaic was no longer held in honour — precisely because of the disastrous history of Númenor. It was left to unchecked change and decay, and sank to being the everyday speech and the only tongue of the unlearned, while everyone of high birth used Sindarin. The language of the rebels lost its standing in the victory of their opponents.

Two survivals are worth naming. Imrahil and Adrahil, the princes of Dol Amroth, carry Númenórean — that is, Adûnaic — names, and Appendix E notes Imrahil specially because his ch does not follow the Sindarin rule. And the river Gwathló is one of the very few geographical names of Middle-earth that became widely known in Númenor and received an Adûnaic translation: Agathurush. In the whole published corpus it is nearly the only Adûnaic place-name outside the island.

A language known mostly through names still yields a vocabulary, because the names are transparent. Azra is the sea, and it gives Eärendil his Adûnaic name Azrubel, sea-lover. Adûn is the west; nimir is an Elf, so that Nimruzir, Elendil's name in this tongue, means Elf-friend exactly as the Elvish one does. Zigûr is a wizard — the word appears as a common noun in the declension tables and as a name for Sauron. Yozayan, the Land of Gift, answers the Quenya Andórë. Pharaz is gold, and it stands in the name of the king who took the fleet west.

The declension paradigms give the shape of an ordinary noun. Zadan, a house, becomes zadān, zadun, zadnat and so on through singular, dual and plural; azra, the sea, gives azrā, azru, azrāt, azrī. Two strong classes and one weak class cover the nouns, and the vowel of the base lengthens or shifts rather than a suffix simply being added. It is the difference between a language that assembles and one that transforms — and it is what the triconsonantal frame is for.

The royal names form a set that can be read straight through, because nearly every one has a Quenya twin: Ar-Adûnakhôr beside Tar-Herunúmen, Ar-Zimrathôn beside Tar-Hostamir, Ar-Sakalthôr beside Tar-Falassion, Ar-Gimilzôr beside Tar-Telemnar, Ar-Inziladûn beside Tar-Palantir. Only a few are translated in the sources; the rest keep their meaning to themselves. The queen Inzilbêth, secretly one of the Faithful, and Gimilkhâd, the younger son who fathered Ar-Pharazôn, belong to the same word-stock — the household names of a dynasty arguing with itself about which language it belonged to.

Nearly everything known about the grammar comes from a single unfinished typescript, and it is worth saying so before any of it is repeated: Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language treats sounds and word-formation at length and then breaks off in the middle of the verb. What follows is therefore complete on the noun and silent where a reader most wants detail.

The build is what gives Adûnaic its distinctive feel. Most word-bases are triconsonantal, with meaning carried by a frame of three consonants — the pattern familiar from the Semitic languages — though a good number are biconsonantal, such as NAKH, to come, and BITH, to say. Every base has a characteristic vowel, which normally appears between the first and second consonant. Originally the language had only three basic vowels, A, I and U, with the diphthongs AI and AU. Nouns distinguish three numbers — singular, plural and a dual used chiefly for natural pairs — and three cases, called normal, subjective and objective. Gender in the strict sense does not exist, though the subjective case distinguishes masculine, feminine, common and neuter forms.

One detail of the fiction is easy to miss and pleasant to keep: within the story, the Númenóreans did not bring a script with them. Adûnaic writing was invented only after they had lived on the island for some time.

Adûnaic is the youngest of Tolkien's major invented languages and one of the last. It arose in 1945 and 1946 around The Notion Club Papers, the unfinished time-travel story he wrote while The Lord of the Rings lay unfinished beside it; the accompanying new version of the fall of Númenor, The Drowning of Anadûnê, carries Adûnaic names throughout.

The frame of that story is worth knowing, because it is where the language gets its name. The modern Englishman Lowdham hears fragments of two ancient tongues in dream and waking vision, and labels them: A is Avallonian, an early form of Quenya, and B is Adûnaic. He describes B as sounding closer to the world of ordinary earth than A does, and Tolkien's stated aim for it was a faintly Semitic flavour. That aim explains the triconsonantal roots — and it is the only one of his major languages built on a non-European model.

What Lowdham hears is not a word-list but connected speech, and the fragments carry the fall of Númenor in their own language: ships that went east, mountains leaning over, a straight road west that afterwards was bent. One line is given a translation on the spot, and it is the only sentence of Adûnaic anywhere that a reader meets already glossed — Narika 'nBari 'nAdun yanakhim, the Eagles of the Lords of the West are at hand. Because the frame story is set in modern Oxford, that sentence is spoken aloud in a college room, which makes Adûnaic the only one of these languages with a scene of its own use built into the text that invents it.

Because it is often assumed otherwise, it is worth stating plainly: the well-known models do not apply here. Finnish stands behind Quenya and Welsh behind Sindarin; Adûnaic has neither. Nor was its place in the history ever quite settled. Tolkien remained undecided whether the speech of the Men of Númenor descended from the original tongue of Men or from Elvish, and in one earlier stage of the conception the Númenóreans spoke Quenya and it was Sauron — who hated everything Elvish — who taught them the old speech of Men that they themselves had forgotten. The language we have kept its shape; the story of where it came from was rewritten more than once.