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.
“ 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
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I do not publish the full wordlists because the information isn't complete (probably, it will not be until the end of the show) and I'm not good at recognizing the sounds of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
