| Black Speech | |
|---|---|
| Created by | J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Date | c. 1945–1973 |
| Setting and usage | Mordor in Middle-earth |
| Users | None |
| Purpose | Constructed language
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
The Black Speech is one of the fictional languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien for his legendarium, where it was spoken in the evil realm of Mordor. In the fiction, Tolkien describes the language as created by Sauron as a constructed language to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor.
Little is known of the Black Speech except the inscription on the One Ring. Scholars note that Tolkien constructed this to be plausible linguistically, and to sound rough and harsh. The scholar Alexandre Nemirovski, on linguistic evidence, has proposed that Tolkien based it on the ancient Hurrian language, which like the Black Speech was agglutinative.