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Fictional language in the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Adûnaic (or Númenórean) ("language of the West") is one of the fictional languages devised by J. R. R. Tolkien for his fantasy works. One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle earth legendarium, Adûnaic was spoken by the Men of Númenor during the Second Age.

Adûnaic was invented by the first Men as they awoke in Hildórien. It was the language of Númenor, and after its destruction in the Akallabêth, the "native speech" of the people of Elendil in the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor in the west of Middle earth, though they usually spoke Sindarin. By the time of the War of the Ring, it had developed into the common speech or Westron. Tolkien called Adûnaic "the language of the culturally and politically influential Númenóreans." Tolkien devised Adûnaic (or Númenórean), the language spoken in Númenor, shortly after World War II, and thus at about the time he completed The Lord of the Rings, but before he wrote the linguistic background information of the Appendices. Adûnaic is intended as the language from which Westron (also called Adûni) is derived. This added a depth of historical development to the Mannish languages. Adûnaic was intended to have a "faintly Semitic flavour". Its development began with his 1945 work The Notion Club Papers. It is there that the most extensive sample of the language is found, revealed to one of the (modern day) protagonists, Lowdham, in a visionary dream of Atlantis. Its grammar is sketched in the unfinished "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language", included in Sauron Defeated. In The Lost Road and Other Writings it is implied that the Númenóreans spoke Quenya, and that Sauron, hating all things Elvish, taught the Númenóreans the old Mannish tongue they themselves had forgotten.

Most information about Adûnaic grammar comes from an incomplete typescript Lowdham's Report on the Adûnaic Language, written by Tolkien to accompany The Notion Club Papers. The report discusses phonology and morphological processes in some detail, and starts to discuss nouns, but breaks off before saying much about verbs, other parts of speech or the grammar as a whole. It appears that Tolkien abandoned work on the language after writing this portion of the Report, and never returned to it.

This Adûnaic text, part of the tale of the Fall of Númenor, appears in The Notion Club Papers. It is fragmentary because it appeared in a dream to Tolkien's frame story character Lowdham, and is only partially translated by him because he did not know the language. Words in bold are not translated at the point in the text where the translation is first given, but their translation is given later in the story.