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Welcome to the Black Speech School, the place where you can learn the language of Orcs, Nazgûls and other Mordor's inhabitants.

If you are interested only in Tolkien's canonical Black Speech I advise you to read the article “Canonical”.

If you don't mind against fans' additions (Neo Black Speech, Pseudo Black Speech, Neo-Orcish), start with Dialects page to understand where various dictionaries and grammatic rules used in this site have come from.

The site was changed recently, so if you're looking for older version, it was moved to Shadowlandian section.

Random quotation

“ The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days. It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes.

LOTR III, Appendix F, Of other races, p. 1486

Latest news

2024-04-14 Nûrlâm's lessons released!

The first 10 lessons of Nûrlâm dialect are now out!

Feel free to ask questions or report mistakes here in the comments or in Discord channel.

Discuss

2024-03-23 Big Transcriber update Release notes

2024-03-09 New article: Orcish lullaby based on the Lay of Leithian

I’ll sing ye famous song, how in the days of yore,
When flat was our world, when Rings have not yet been made,
Our first Dark Lord defeated was by Elfin maid,
Where others failed; Tinúviel was name of her.

Idea of making a lullaby from Lay of Leithian came to me after reading a Russian translation of “Beren and Luthien” book, where line “Down crumpled Orc, down Balrog proud” resembled the song “Sleep tired toys, books are asleep…” from a children show. But making a lullaby for Orcs required changes to be made, for example baby-orc should be afraid of Lúthien. I've also made a quick research to be sure that scary lullabies are the thing in almost every culture.

2024-02-12 New article: More (untranslated) Black Speech in Amazon's “The Rings of Power”

Twitter/X account "Rings of Power Updates" posted a sample of Black Speech without translation.

All News