Thanks to films and TV series, many books have been rediscovered by readers and have become more popular than ever. An exemplary case of this success is represented by the dense production of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 – 1973).
Perhaps not everyone knows that in his books, JJR Tolkien not only imagined characters, worlds, and traditions but also gave his stories about what distinguishes cultures and deeply characterizes each individual: language.
Oxford professor, philologist, and linguist, Tolkien invented 20 languages, each with its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Among them, the most complete and fascinating are the elven languages Quenya (the language of the elves of the lost West, learned and sapiential, a sort of “elven Latin”) and Sindarin (the language of the elves of Middle-earth), but all have been cleverly connected by Tolkien in an evolutionary scheme and mutual connections that closely resembles the languages of the real world.
The activity of creating artificial languages by developing each part of them (phonology, grammar, lexicon…, etc.) is called “glossopoiesis,” from the Greek glossa (language) and póiesis (creation). The purpose of the author of a new language can be varied. For example, within a novel, inventing a “lingua franca” can allow the meeting of characters from different worlds and cultures. Another reason can be pure linguistic experimentation.
Tolkien showed linguistic interest from a young age: Greek, Latin, Italian, and Finnish were among the first languages he learned with considerable skill. A famous quote from Tolkien compares the discovery of the Finn to the discovery of “a cellar full of bottles of extraordinary wine, of a type and flavor never tasted before. It completely intoxicated me”.
Tolkien wrote in one of his letters: “No one believes me when I say that my long book (i.e. “The Lord of the Rings”) is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language acceptable to my personal aesthetic sense can seem real”.
Whatever the evolution of the facts, that is, whether Tolkien used his stories for the pleasure of creating new languages or whether on the contrary, the creation of new languages inspired the stories, we readers are still fascinated by the atmospheres narrated by the English writer in each of his works.
While on the one hand, infinite languages can be created, on the other, modern linguists have advanced a very interesting point of view regarding the languages of the world. According to linguists, all the languages we speak are similar in certain aspects: they manifest the same pattern, follow the same rules, and are learned in exactly the same way. The differences are therefore only superficial. Noam Chomsky (born in 1928; American philosopher, linguist, cognitive scientist, communication theorist, and political activist) states that if a Martian scientist, someone with a different type of intelligence, were to study the languages of the world, he would conclude that they are all dialects of a single language that embodies a “universal grammar”.
To conclude, languages change, evolve, and are created, fundamental for man is communication. Diversity brings richness everywhere.