- I could give an intro to Tolkien and his influence on the fantasy genre, but fortunately for me, beloved humorist and author, Terry Pratchett, has already done that for me.

Said Pratchett in 2010, "Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mount Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints."

"Sometimes it's big and up close."

"Sometimes it's a shape on the horizon."

"Sometimes it's not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, or is, in fact, standing on Mount Fuji."

So Tolkien is widely regarded as the most influential author on the fantasy genre, period.

But one of the less-discussed aspects of his work is the way Tolkien used constructed languages in his writing.

Nowadays, authors are constantly making up words and languages for the worlds they build, but Tolkien was unique in that he constructed languages first and then created worlds so his fictional languages would have somewhere to live.

In 1958, he wrote in a letter to his son, Christopher, "'The Lord of the Rings' was an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real."

And in a lecture he gave to some fellow philologists in 1931, Tolkien described his fondness for constructing fictional languages as a secret vice, almost like a shameful hobby.

But Tolkien's secret vice wasn't just a strange quirk.

It ended up being one of the most influential aspects of everything that he wrote.

(groovy music) (repetitive chime ringing) Let's talk a little bit about constructed languages, or, as they're called in the community, a thing that exists, con-langs.

- [Princess] According to linguist Arika Okrent, "There are trends or eras in language invention that reflect the preoccupations of the surrounding culture, and so, in a way, the history of invented languages is a story about the way we think about language."

- According to Okrent, the history of constructed languages is, for most of its history, extremely utilitarian.

Between the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea of a constructed universal language was thought of as a way of cataloging and understand the world.

And it is linked more with the development of science and mathematical notation as opposed to natural language, which was seen as, you know, flawed where it was not logical.

But by the 19th century, attention shifted to the social use of language.

In 1887, Polish linguist L. L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, to this day, the most widely-spoken constructed language in the world.

It was described as an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

And then World War I happened.

But Tolkien was not the first to invent language in fiction.

Sir Thomas More's 1516 book, "Utopia," Francis Godwin's 1638 book, "Man in the Moon," and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" become important landmarks in the early use of language invention.

Swift created names, place names, and phrases in several languages, spoken of places like Lilliput and Brobdingnag.

But none of these examples reach the level of complexity in Tolkien's languages.

According to Okrent, "These creations usually aren't languages so much as they are ideas, a bit of vocabulary, a few phrases."

"They serve the story, never the other way around."

"For Tolkien, language creation was an art all its own."

Tolkien intertwined myth and language to create, in his words, an illusion of historicity.

From his earliest language writing in 1907 all the way to his death in the 1970s, Tolkien never stopped developing what he called his nexus of languages.

Tolkien didn't just see language creation as a hobby, but as an art akin to writing fiction, and saw the two as intertwined.

In his own words, "For perfect construction of an art-language, it is found necessary to construct, at least in outline, a mythology concomitant."

"The converse is indeed true, your language construction will breed a mythology."

He notes that in contrast to more utilitarian constructed languages, like Esperanto, his interest was in associating language invention with pleasure.

But Tolkien tended to downplay his languages to his friends and family, calling it his secret vice and using such dismissive and self-deprecating ways to describe them as, "my nonsense fairy languages," "unpublished inventions known only to my family," and, "the shame-faced revelation of specimens of my own more considered effort."

I'm a science fiction writer, I know how he feels.

By the time Tolkien started working on "The Hobbit" in the early 1930s, he had already invented the nexus of languages, which gave his nomenclature, again, in his words, "coherence and consistency" that he found lacking in other name inventors.

Shade.

The first instance we see of this nexus is simply the mention of Moria.

Moria is in Noldorin, later Sindarin, or your basic Elvish name, meaning black chasm.

We would also later know it by its Dwarfish name, Khazad-dum.

But while there's evidence of Tolkien's language invention serving his nomenclature in "The Hobbit," it was not until the publication of the first entry in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "The Fellowship of the Ring," in 1954, that readers were given the first longer samples of his Elvish languages.

On page 80 of "Fellowship," Frodo flexes his language skills by speaking, (speaking Elvish) a star shines on the hour of our meeting.

You go, Frodo, you work those college language credits.

This is the first example of an Elvish language, in this case, the High Elven language of Quenya, appearing as dialogue in the text.

Later, in the same volume, some elves speak it, and we also get some poems.

For instance, "Galadriel's Lament," AKA, "Namarie," which means farewell.

(Tolkien speaking Elvish) Language is a recurring theme throughout the books, even the tree-like Ents not only get a few inaccurate, Treebeard's words, not mine, samplings of their own extremely slow and thoughtful language.

- Young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish.

- But also discuss the way that it differs from the languages of elves, dwarves, and men.

It's not only very slow, it's also highly detailed.

Even the elves, master linguists, could not learn Old Entish.

And in "Return of the King," we get appendices that talk a lot about the languages and the translation, 'cause Tolkien, he's acting as a historian, not a fiction writer, see, tee-hee.

Here, he equivocates Westron, the common language of men, with modern English, and Rohirric, the language of Rohan, with Old English, and so on.

But Tolkien's mythology is most meticulously developed in "The Silmarillion," which is Tolkien in full self-indulgence mode.

It was published posthumously, so we don't know what we would have wanted the reader in on exactly, but it's the most detailed outlining of his mythology that's been published.

So let's talk specifics about his nexus of languages.

Sindarin, the language of the gray elves, is basically the common tongue of elves in Middle Earth in the Third Age, when "Lord of the Rings" takes place.

So Legolas, Elrond, and Arwen, they speak Sindarin.

(speaking Sindarin) It has characteristics similar to Welsh and other Celtic languages, such as Irish, Manx, Scottish, and Cornish.

Quenya is language of the Eldar after they returned to Middle Earth.

So it's the primary language of high elves, like Galadriel and Celeborn.

But the elves of Lothlorien still speak Sindarin on the day-to-day, so it's considered like a high, formal language.

Aragorn speaks it sometimes.

(singing in Sindarin) Quenya's biggest real world language influence was Finnish, which was J.R.R.

's fave, and its use in Finnish epics like the "Kalevala."

Quenya focused on the use of open long vowels, and his sound-combination rules emphasized a softenant of consonant stops, all elements of Finnish phonetics.

That said, many of the words in Quenya tend to open in vowels, whereas in Sindarin, words tend to end in consonants, giving Sindarin a different sound aesthetic than Quenya.

Quenya and Sindarin both descend from a common ancestor, Quendian, because Tolkien wanted his Elvish languages to feel lived-in and evolve like real languages do.

So where English, German, Spanish, Irish, Persian, and Hindi all descend from the same proto-language and are in the same language family, so it goes with Elvish languages.

This is in contrast to Sauron's Black Speech.

Black Speech is almost kind of a parody of international auxiliary languages, like Esperanto.

Sauron created it to be his own evil language inaccessible to outsiders, not an organic language within a language family that evolved over time.

The most famous use of this is, of course, the inscription on the One Ring.

- [Frodo] There are markings.

It's some form of Elvish.

I can't read it.

- There are few who can.

- Even though it's written in Elvish script, and we'll get to that, weirdly, in universe, it's mostly restricted to Sauron's evil higher-ups, like the Nazgul that speak it.

Most orcs just speak like a Cockney variant on Westron, or English.

- We ain't had nothing but maggoty bread for three stinking days.

- Yeah.

Why can't we have some meats?

- And then there's dwarves and their Dwarfish language, Khuzdul, based partially on Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

Yeah, about that.

Tolkien noted some similarities between dwarves and Jewish people.

Both were, in his words, "At once natives and aliens in their habitation, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue."

Tolkien also stated that dwarves' words are Semitic, obviously constructed to be Semitic.

And I, oop.

So yeah, maybe a little tone-deaf.

Khuzdul has its own script that is based on Nordic runes and is derived from Cirth, another invention of Tolkien.

But in universe, not much is known about it because the dwarves keep it secret.

So it has very little vocabulary compared to Elvish languages.

Tengwar, the writing system used to write Elvish and Black Speech, is utilized much more in terms of script.

The most famous use, again, of course, being one ring to rule them all, and so on.

(speaking Black Speech) It has been described as a script that looks like a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman shorthand.

But we can only speculate on what writing systems influenced Tengwar.

The way it incorporates vowels reminds me of abugida scripts, like Devanagari, which is used for Northern Indian languages, like Hindi.

But that's just my read.

So given all we know about these languages, is it possible to speak Quenya and Sindarin?

No.

The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Tolkien's invented languages, even of Quenya and Sindarin, are far too incomplete to allow its casual, conversational, or quotidian use.

So a lot of what you see in the movies is guesswork, much of which was constructed by linguist David Salo, who kind of filled in the plugs in the DNA sequence gaps with frog DNA.

Even before the publication of the final volume of "The Lord of the Rings," fans began to write to Tolkien to ask for more information about his invented languages.

And he actually indulged them, for a little while, until they started calling his house in the middle of the night and, you know, he had to move and remove his listing from the phone book.

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

Starting in the 1960s, linguists and scholars began to create societies dedicated to the study of his languages, like The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, which collab-ed with J.R.R.

's son, Christopher, in the 90s, to edit and publish his father's numerous manuscripts of detailed linguistic material.

Ever since, there have been Tolkien language bulletins, magazines, and societies popping up, dedicated to studying his languages.

And they exploded in popularity with the release of "The Lord of the Rings" films starting in 2001.

And Tolkien's influence lives on.

There are many, for instances, but let's look at Richard Adams's "Watership Down."

It has the rabbit language, Lapine, which is integrated throughout the text so that the reader absorbs it through context clues.

So when, towards the end of the book, a good rabbit tells the bad rabbit, (speaking Lupine) effectively, eat (beep), the reader understands it without needing it translated.

Nowadays, con-langs are in the popular mainstream.

As "Star Trek" was becoming a thing, "Lord of the Rings" was also exploding in popularity in the US, so around the same time, we got Klingon, the most immediate and obvious descendant from Tolkien's languages, and it is now, according to some, the most highly-developed con-lang there is, that we know of.

It also has the highest number of any speakers for any fictional con-lang.

We're not counting languages like Esperanto, which is, you know, they're trying.

Now, producers of movies and TV shows actually hire professional linguists and members of con-lang societies to build language for dialogue.

The Dothraki language in George R.R.

Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire," which Martin only briefly outlined in the novels, was developed into a full-functioning language in "Game of Thrones."

And for "Avatar," James Cameron hired linguist Paul Frommer to create the Na'vi language, largely based on Polynesian languages and things that sound tribal yet futuristic, like the Papyrus font.

Even video games, like "Skyrim" and "Dragon Age," have their own language systems.

In "Skyrim," learning to use the dragon language is a crucial part of the gameplay.

Tolkien's work play a crucial role in elevating language invention to a key part of inventing imaginary worlds, and elements of invented language are now part and parcel of science fiction and fantasy.

David Peterson, who fleshed out George R.R.

Martin's Dothraki and High Valerian languages from a few words to fully fleshed-out con-langs, claims that prior to 1991, people looked down on con-langers.

But post-2015, he says the con-lang community has really taken off.

There are con-langers active on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, who have no connection to any of the original communities.

And they're drawing inspiration from languages that didn't even exist five years ago.

So it's kind of funny that Tolkien was so shy about the fact that he had a hobby of inventing languages since it ended up being incredibly influential not just on fantasy fiction, but on fiction in general.

So don't be ashamed of your secret vice.

Post that cringe.

You might accidentally end up inventing a genre.