Black Speech

Every other language in these histories has a history: speakers who moved, kings who forbade, coasts where two tongues mixed. The Black Speech has an author. Sauron devised it in the Dark Years of the Second Age, and Appendix F marks that explicitly — it is the one language of Middle-earth that did not come about but was made, by one person, for a purpose.

The purpose was one language for all his servants, and the sources are equally explicit that it failed. The reason lies in the material he was working with. Appendix F says the Orcs never possessed a tongue that was theirs: whatever they spoke had been seized from elsewhere and twisted to suit them, and it broke apart into a separate crude dialect for every group and settlement. That splintering is exactly what created the need for a common language — and exactly what defeated it.

What the Orcs of the Third Age actually used between breeds was not the Black Speech but Westron, in their own fashion — and the narrative shows it rather than states it, when two Orcs of different kinds argue their way through the Morgai in the Common Speech. Sauron's invented tongue survived among his soldiers as a handful of loanwords in a jargon built out of somebody else's language.

The corpus distinguishes two forms of the language, and the distinction is the only internal structure it has. There is the older Black Speech, the form of the Ring-inscription; and there is “the more debased form used by the soldiers of the Dark Tower, of whom Grishnákh was the captain.” After Sauron's first overthrow “this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl” — the single case in the whole legendarium of an unbroken chain of speakers held together by beings who do not die.

With Sauron's return the Black Speech became again the official language of Barad-dûr and of the captains of Mordor. That is a precise description: an official language, a language of command and administration, never a language anyone grew up in — with one exception. The new race of Trolls of the late Third Age, the Olog-hai, bore a Black Speech name and knew no other tongue at all. They are the only group in the canon for whom Sauron's invention was a mother tongue.

The only connected sentence of the language in the novel belongs to the debased stage, not the pure one: an Orc of Mordor curses in front of Pippin and then goes on at length in his own tongue, which the book does not reproduce. It is worth knowing how little firm ground that sentence gives. Three differing translations of it exist among Tolkien's papers — in one bagronk is a cesspool, in another a torture chamber — and Christopher Tolkien records that his father never settled the matter. The most quoted line of the Black Speech is also its least certain.

The whole attested vocabulary would fit on a card. Nazg is a ring, and it stands in Nazgûl, Ring-wraith — Sauron's own name for the Nine, where the Elves said Úlairi; the name belongs to the language of their maker, not to Eldarin tradition. Ghâsh is fire, the one word Gandalf catches when he hears Orcs talking in Moria. Sharku is old man, which is where Saruman's nickname Sharkey comes from. Lugbúrz is the Dark Tower, what the Orcs call Barad-dûr. Uruk and snaga divide the Orcs themselves: uruk for the great soldier-Orcs of Mordor and Isengard, snaga, slave, for the lesser breeds, especially in the mouths of the Uruk-hai. A language with a word for slave built into its rank system.

Even that short list is not purely Sauron's. Uruk is related to Sindarin orch, and it was probably borrowed by Sauron from the Elvish languages of earlier days — the invented tongue contains Elvish loan material at its most characteristic point, the word for its own soldiers. The relation is not a simple translation pair either: orch is any Orc, uruk specifically the drilled and disciplined ones of Mordor's regiments. And in the opposite direction the Orcs took from Elvish through Westron: tark, a man of Gondor, is a mangled form of tarkil, itself a Quenya word.

The word uruk outlived its origin. Saruman's troops at the Fords of Isen are called grim Uruks, and Gandalf in Moria speaks of black Uruks of Mordor — the term is established in the narrative as a foreign word long before Appendix F explains it. Of all Sauron's linguistic project, the part that spread furthest was a rank designation.

The sounds are described in Appendix E, and they are chosen against the Elvish grain. There gh “represents a ‘back spirant’ (related to g as dh to d)”; it is heard in ghâsh and agh. There is a z with the value of English z, precisely the sound that neither Quenya nor Sindarin of the Third Age possessed: it appears in nazg, in burzum, in Lugbúrz. The sound of English sh occurs, in ghâsh and in Shagrat. And k and kh are used, as in all non-Elvish names, to mark the language as foreign; the circumflex in Nazgûl or ghâsh does the same and carries no other meaning.

One remark in Appendix E goes beyond description. The book says: “The Orcs, and some Dwarves, are said to have used a back or uvular r, a sound which the Eldar found distasteful.” It is the only place in the whole apparatus where a sound is judged by the ear of another people — not wrong, not foreign, but unpleasant. The aesthetic verdict is part of the record.

For all that, the language has no letters of its own. The Ring-inscription is written in tengwar — Elvish letters in an archaic mode, as Gandalf says, but in the tongue of Mordor. Sauron devised a language and then used the writing system of his enemies to record his most important sentence. One statistical detail follows from the borrowing: in the Black Speech the vowel î was rare, which is why the same tengwa mark could be used there for u where the title-page uses it for o.

No other tongue in the book is treated as dangerous to say. In the Shire Gandalf refuses to speak it aloud. At the Council of Elrond he does speak it, and the change in the room is described as physical: the sun darkens, the Elves stop their ears, and Gandalf afterwards wishes it may never be spoken in Imladris again. Isildur's scroll already calls the inscription the tongue of Mordor and of the servants of the Tower, so the association is as old as the language itself.

The taboo has a consequence that is easy to overlook and that Tolkien himself drew out: because no other people used the language willingly, it left almost no names on the map. Morannon, Mordor, Gorgoroth are Elvish; even the place-names of Mordor are in Elvish or in the Common Speech. A language conceived to rule a realm did not manage to name it. Only in the drafts is there an Orkish name for Minas Morgul, Dushgoi, and Tolkien struck it.

The same reasoning shapes how the language appears on the page. Westron was turned into English throughout, but the few scraps of Black Speech were left untranslated. What a reader sees of Mordor's language is therefore the only unmediated speech in the book — the one place where the translator's convention is suspended, and it is suspended for the language nobody wanted to hear.

There is an older act in the legendarium that the Black Speech answers. Aulë made the Dwarves before their time and gave them a language of their own, Khuzdul, which they guarded and kept secret; his making was corrected by Ilúvatar but not undone, and the language remained a gift. Sauron, who had been of Aulë's people before he went over to Melkor, did the same thing for the opposite reason: he made a language and gave it to servants, so that they should have one speech and he should be the one who set it. Scholars have called this a perverse counterpart of Aulë's act, and the parallel holds down to the detail — one language kept by its speakers as a treasure, the other imposed on them and never taken up.

The difference in outcome is the point. Khuzdul was so well kept that the Dwarves used the languages of Men in public and let no one else learn their own; the Black Speech was so little wanted that its intended speakers went on using Westron among themselves. One language survived by being hidden, the other failed by being commanded. That is a statement about how languages actually live, made in a story about a ring.

Appendix F says the Orcs had no language of their own. The late writings say something else. In the text called Orcs among the Myths Transformed, the Orcs do have languages, differing by breed, and it was Melkor who taught them to speak and they who passed it on. That is not a variant detail but a different account of where speech in Mordor comes from — from the first Dark Lord rather than the second.

The same shift is visible in the drafting of the appendix itself. In an earlier version the Orcs did have a language, devised for them by the Dark Lord of old — Morgoth, not Sauron. The published form moved the invention forward by an age and gave it to Sauron alone. And in the earliest layer of all, the Lhammas of the 1930s, the Orkish tongue is called Orquin or Orquian and is partly of Valian origin because it came from Morgoth; the Black Speech as Sauron's work did not yet exist.

One older word marks the boundary of what belongs to this language at all. The Orc-cry Golug for the Noldor is First-Age Orkish, and the sources never call it Black Speech. It shows that Orcs were making words of their own long before Sauron sat down to design a language for them — which is precisely the difficulty his project ran into.

The familiar models do not apply here. Finnish stands behind Quenya and Welsh behind Sindarin; the Black Speech was not intentionally modelled on any style at all. Tolkien's stated aim was that it be self-consistent, very different from Elvish, yet organised and expressive, as would be expected of a device of Sauron before his complete corruption — evidently, he added, an agglutinative language. He also said that he had tried to play fair linguistically, and that it was meant to have a meaning and not to be a mere casual group of nasty noises.

One real-world source he conceded himself. Asked about nazg, he thought it likely that he had been influenced, unconsciously, by the Irish nasc, a ring, a fastening, a bond — a rare case of his admitting a real language behind an invented word. A derivation from Old English he expressly rejected. The word for ring in the language of domination may come from a word that also means obligation.

How little is actually known is worth stating at the end rather than hiding. Tolkien himself drew the boundary in a letter: the Black Speech occurs in the book only in the Ring-inscription, one Orc sentence, and the word Nazgûl. Everything beyond that comes from working papers published long after his death, and it is unfinished — including the translation of that single sentence, which exists in three incompatible versions. Claims about the grammar of the Black Speech, of which there are many in circulation, rest on a corpus that would fit on a single page.

Almost everything that can be said about the language beyond Appendix F comes from papers published decades after Tolkien's death, in the journals of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship — Vinyar Tengwar, appearing since 1988, and Parma Eldalamberon, which since 1995 has printed Tolkien's linguistic manuscripts with the authorisation of the estate. Tolkien's own word-by-word gloss of the Ring-inscription is not in the novel at all; it stands in one of those volumes. Readers who want the grammar are not reading the book, they are reading an archive.

One outside model has been proposed seriously and remains disputed: a resemblance to Hurrian, an extinct language of the ancient Near East, argued from the shape of certain endings. The objection is as simple as the claim — the elements in question may not be suffixes of a system at all, but pieces of the handful of words that happen to survive. With a corpus this small, a pattern and a coincidence look alike. Tolkien himself named no model, and said the language was not intentionally built on any style.