Home
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, 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.
“ Orquin, or Orquian, the language of the Orcs, the soldiers and creatures of Morgoth, was partly itself of Valian origin, for it was derived from the Vala Morgoth. But the speech which he taught he perverted wilfully to evil, as he did all things, and the language of the Orcs was hideous and foul and utterly unlike the languages of the Qendi. But Morgoth himself spoke all tongues with power and beauty, when so he wished.
HOME vol. 5, The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part Two, Chapter V: The Lhammas, p. 194
Latest news
2026-07-20 Small update to Orcish-English-Russian dictionary
Orcish-English-Russian dictionary was updated with a few clarified etymologies and new words from MERP (mostly related to weapons).
2026-07-01 New article: Translation of Barrow-wight's spell
I am intending to translate some less-known songs from the Lord of the Rings which may be associated with the forces of Evil into Nûrlâm. And Barrow-wight's magical incantation is the first in the series. Read at Black Speech School's wiki.
2026-02-20 New article: MERP Review
After finishing a short adventure which took several years to complete due to scheduling problems, I decided to finally write a review of MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing) game full of my personal preferences, prejudices and controversial hot takes.
2025-10-10 New article: Orcish / Black Speech in Amazon's “The Rings of Power” series — Season 2
This post will contain Orcish names and phrases from the second season of “The Rings of Power” series. Check my previous article about the first season. Many thanks to Bear McCreary for his blog shedding light on the languages of Middle-Earth used in the show's songs.
I like that Black Speech is now featured in almost every episode.
I do not publish the full wordlists because the information isn't complete (probably, it will not be until the end of the show) and I'm not good at recognizing the sounds of language I don't know. However, few 100% confirmed words are now included into Orcish-English-Russian dictionary of blackspeech.de.
Also, now it's confirmed that the translations into Tolkien's languages are done by a team lead by Carl F. Hostetter.
2025-06-03 Transcriber updated Release notes
Subscribe
