Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/January 2015

Quenya is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used by the Elves in his fictional universe that is commonly known as Middle-earth.

Tolkien began devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar several times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language had been a major source of inspiration, but Tolkien was also familiar with Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish languages was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak those tongues in their own fictional universe since he felt that, as with the historical languages he studied professionally, his languages changed and developed over time not in a vacuum, but as a result of the migrations and interactions of the peoples who spoke them.

Within Tolkien's fictive universe, Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi ('speakers') in Quenya. Quenya translates as simply "language", or, in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history, "elf-language". Find out more...