Adûnaic: The Lost Language of Númenor
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Quick Answer: Adûnaic is the native language of Númenor, the island kingdom of Men in the Second Age. Its name comes from adûn "west". Tolkien sketched it mainly in "Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language" (Sauron Defeated, 1992). Only a limited vocabulary survives, mostly in royal names such as Ar-Pharazôn "the Golden" and Adûnakhôr "Lord of the West". It is the ancestor of Westron, the Common Speech of The Lord of the Rings.
Every reader of The Lord of the Rings has met Adûnaic without knowing it. When Faramir speaks of the Men of Westernesse, when Aragorn claims the blood of Númenor, and when the Common Speech itself appears on the page, the language behind all of it is Adûnaic. The island sank; the language became the bones of Westron.
It is also one of Tolkien's least-known languages, for a simple reason: most of what he wrote about it was published only in 1992, in The History of Middle-earth. This guide collects what is actually attested, explains the names you will meet in the Akallabêth and The Rings of Power, and is careful about what is not known.
What Adûnaic Is
Adûnaic (Tolkien also spelled it Adunaic) is the language of the Adûnâim, the Men of Westernesse. Its name is built on adûn "west", the same element that gives the island its native name Anadûnê, "Westernesse". Quenya called the island Númenórë, which is the name most readers know.
Its roots go back before Númenor. The Edain, the Men who fought beside the Elves in the First Age, spoke related tongues. According to Tolkien's accounts, Adûnaic grew mainly from the speech of the House of Hador, with influence from the other houses, and it was carried over the sea when the Edain were given the island at the start of the Second Age.
Tolkien's main source is the fictional "Lowdham's Report", written as part of The Notion Club Papers, an unfinished time-travel novel in which a modern Oxford philologist, Arundel Lowdham, receives fragments of Adûnaic in dreams. It is a strange frame, but it contains the most detailed grammar sketch Tolkien made for any language of Men.
Language Politics in Númenor
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Try It Free →For much of its history Númenor was bilingual, and the balance between the languages tells the story of its fall.
| Period | Situation | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Early Second Age | Adûnaic the common speech; nobility also knew Sindarin; Quenya used for royal names and lore | Akallabêth; Unfinished Tales |
| The Kings' growing pride | Adûnaic royal names appear alongside Quenya ones | Akallabêth |
| Ar-Gimilzôr | Use of the Elvish tongues forbidden; the Faithful persecuted | Akallabêth |
| Tar-Palantir | A king who repented and took a Quenya name again | Akallabêth |
| Ar-Pharazôn | Last king; seized the throne and led the assault on Valinor | Akallabêth |
The Faithful, the party loyal to the Elves (Elendil and his house among them), kept Sindarin and Quenya alive. That is why the kingdoms they founded in exile, Gondor and Arnor, have Elvish names: Elendil, Isildur, Minas Tirith. The rest of Númenor went down with its Adûnaic kings.
This is the key point for any Tolkien reader: choosing a language in Númenor was a political statement. A king taking an Adûnaic name, instead of a Quenya one with Tar-, was announcing a break with the Elves. For how the Elvish side of that divide works, see what languages the Elves actually speak.
The Kings' Names Decoded
The royal names are the richest and most reliable source of Adûnaic. Many kings had both an Adûnaic and a Quenya name, which works like a bilingual inscription. The Quenya half often tells us what the Adûnaic half means.
| Adûnaic name | Quenya equivalent | Meaning | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ar-Adûnakhôr | Tar-Herunúmen | Lord of the West | Akallabêth; Unfinished Tales |
| Ar-Pharazôn | Tar-Calion | the Golden | Akallabêth |
| Ar-Gimilzôr | Tar-Telemnar | associated with gimil "star" | Unfinished Tales; Sauron Defeated |
| Ar-Inziladûn | Tar-Palantir | associated with inzil "flower" + adûn "west" | Unfinished Tales |
| Ar-Zimraphel | Tar-Míriel | the queen Ar-Pharazôn forced to marry him | Akallabêth |
| Ar-Sakalthôr | Tar-Falassion | a late king | Unfinished Tales |
Two patterns stand out:
- Ar- is the royal prefix. It plays the same role that Tar- plays in Quenya names. From Ar-Adûnakhôr onward, the kings took the Adûnaic form first.
- Adûnakhôr is the clearest compound: adûn "west" + khôr "lord". Taking the title "Lord of the West" was, in the Akallabêth, a blasphemy, since that title belonged to the Valar.
A word of caution: for several names Tolkien gave the Quenya form but no detailed gloss of the Adûnaic one. Where the table says "associated with", that is the extent of the evidence. We are not going to invent a meaning for Ar-Sakalthôr.
Attested Words
Source key: SD = Sauron Defeated ("Lowdham's Report" and the Adûnaic Akallabêth fragment). Ak = Akallabêth (The Silmarillion). UT = Unfinished Tales. App F = Appendix F, LotR.
| Word | Meaning | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| adûn | west | SD; Ak | Base of Adûnaic, Anadûnê |
| Anadûnê | Westernesse, Númenor | SD; Ak | Adûnaic name of the island |
| Adûnâim | the Men of Westernesse | SD | Plural of the people's name |
| khôr | lord | Ak (in Adûnakhôr) | |
| ar- | royal prefix, king | Ak; UT | Adûnaic equivalent of Quenya tar- |
| pharaz | gold | SD; Ak | In Ar-Pharazôn |
| gimil | star | SD | In Ar-Gimilzôr |
| inzil | flower | SD; UT | In Ar-Inziladûn |
| Zigûr | the Wizard, a name of Sauron | Ak | Name the Númenóreans gave Sauron |
| Akallabêth | the Downfallen | Ak | Adûnaic form of Quenya Atalantë |
| Nimruzîr | Elendil's Adûnaic name | SD | Contains nimir "Elf" |
| nimir | Elf | SD | |
| Avallôni | Avallónë, the Elvish haven in Tol Eressëa | SD | A borrowing from the Elvish name |
Akallabêth is worth a moment. It is the Adûnaic title of the tale of Númenor's fall in The Silmarillion, which also gives the Quenya equivalent Atalantë, "the Downfallen". So even the title of the story you read about Númenor is in Adûnaic.
Nimruzîr, Elendil's Adûnaic name, is quietly moving. It contains nimir "Elf", which suits the leader of the Elf-friends; Tolkien's analysis in Sauron Defeated reads it as "Elf-friend", a direct match for the Quenya Elendil.
What is not attested
Online lists sometimes offer Adûnaic words for everyday things: "sword", "love", "sea" as general vocabulary, whole sentences for tattoos. Tolkien's Adûnaic corpus is small, and much of it survives only in names and in a short fragment of the Adûnaic Akallabêth in Sauron Defeated. If a word does not trace back to that material, treat it as a modern reconstruction. We have left out any word we could not tie to a source.
Grammar Features
Lowdham's Report is unusual because it describes Adûnaic grammar in some detail, even though the vocabulary is thin. The notable features:
Triconsonantal roots
Many Adûnaic words are built on roots of three consonants, with vowels changing to make related words. This is the same structural idea as Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, and Tolkien said the Adûnaic of his notes had a "faintly Semitic flavour". The same flavour runs through Khuzdul, the Dwarves' language; Tolkien's accounts suggest the early Edain had contact with Dwarves.
Four noun genders
Lowdham's Report divides Adûnaic nouns into masculine, feminine, common and neuter genders. Unlike European grammatical gender, the classes line up with meaning: male beings, female beings, beings of either sex, and things.
Normal and subjective forms
Adûnaic nouns have a normal form and a subjective form. The subjective form marks a noun used as the subject of a sentence in certain constructions. It is not a perfect match for the "nominative" case of Latin, and Lowdham's Report spends several pages on how the two forms behave.
Long vowels
The circumflexed vowels you see everywhere (â, ê, ô, û, î) are long. They carry grammatical weight: vowel length is one of the ways words built on the same root are told apart.
A caution applies here too: Tolkien revised Adûnaic across several drafts, and Lowdham's Report is itself framed as a fictional scholar's incomplete notes. Treat the grammar as a sketch, not a textbook.
Pronunciation
Adûnaic is romanized with the same conventions as Tolkien's other languages:
| Spelling | Sound |
|---|---|
| â, ê, ô, û, î | long vowels; Adûnakhôr is "ah-DOO-nah-khor", with long û and ô |
| kh | as in Scottish loch |
| ph | as in English "phone" |
| z | as in English "zoo" |
| th | as in "thin" |
Say Ar-Pharazôn as "ar FAH-rah-zon", holding the final ô.
From Adûnaic to Westron
Adûnaic did not die with Númenor. Appendix F explains that the Common Speech (Westron) grew from the Adûnaic spoken by Númenórean settlers along the coasts of Middle-earth. It mixed with the languages of the Men they ruled and absorbed many Elvish words. By the end of the Third Age it was spoken from the Shire to Gondor.
That makes Adûnaic the grandparent of the language Frodo and Sam "really" speak. Tolkien's conceit is that The Lord of the Rings is translated from Westron into English. Hobbit names are rendered into English for the same reason, while the few names left untranslated show Westron's Adûnaic heritage.
The Faithful in exile also kept Sindarin as a language of nobility, which is why Gondorian lords like Faramir speak it. For how Sindarin itself works and where to start, see Sindarin for beginners.
Adûnaic in The Rings of Power
Amazon's The Rings of Power brought Númenor to the screen, with Ar-Pharazôn, Tar-Míriel and Elendil as major characters. The political split between Elf-friends and the King's Men, which Tolkien expressed partly through language, is central to the show's Númenor.
However, most Númenórean dialogue in the series is in English, and the Elvish lines are what fans usually search for. Our Rings of Power Elvish guide covers those. Treat any Adûnaic you see on screen the way we treat Salo's film Sindarin or film Black Speech: interesting, but not something Tolkien wrote unless it matches the sources above.
Learning a Númenórean Language Today
Adûnaic is not a language you can learn to speak; there is not enough of it. The Númenóreans' other languages are another matter. Their nobility spoke Sindarin, and their royal names and ceremonies used Quenya, both of which are far better attested.
If Númenor is what draws you in, start there. Our Elvish course teaches both Quenya and Sindarin with every word sourced, and the Tengwar name tool writes a name in the Elvish script the Númenóreans themselves used.
People Also Ask
What is Adûnaic? The native language of the Men of Númenor, descended from the speech of the House of Hador, described mainly in "Lowdham's Report" in Sauron Defeated.
Did the Númenóreans speak Elvish or Adûnaic? Both. Adûnaic was the everyday tongue; the nobility knew Sindarin and used Quenya for royal names, until later kings banned the Elvish languages.
What does Ar-Pharazôn mean? "The Golden". Ar- is the royal prefix, pharaz "gold"; his Quenya name was Tar-Calion.
Is Westron descended from Adûnaic? Yes. Appendix F says the Common Speech grew from the Adûnaic of the coastal Númenórean settlements.
Related Reading
People Also Ask
What is Adûnaic?
Adûnaic is the native language of the Men of Númenor, descended from the speech of the House of Hador. Tolkien developed it mainly in 'Lowdham's Report on the Adunaic Language', published in Sauron Defeated (The History of Middle-earth vol. 9). Its name comes from adûn, 'west'.
Did the Númenóreans speak Elvish or Adûnaic?
Both. Adûnaic was the everyday language of most Númenóreans, while the nobility also knew Sindarin, and Quenya was used for royal names and high ceremony. As Númenor turned against the Elves, the later kings took Adûnaic names and banned the Elvish tongues.
What does Ar-Pharazôn mean?
Ar-Pharazôn is 'the Golden'. Ar- is the royal prefix in Adûnaic names and the element pharaz is associated with gold. His Quenya name was Tar-Calion.
Is Westron descended from Adûnaic?
Yes. Appendix F says the Common Speech (Westron) arose from the Adûnaic spoken by Númenóreans on the coasts of Middle-earth, mixed with the languages of the Men they ruled and enriched with Elvish words.
Is Adûnaic spoken in The Rings of Power?
The series stages Númenor, where Adûnaic belongs, but most Númenórean dialogue in the show is in English, with occasional Elvish. Tolkien's Adûnaic vocabulary is small, so the language mainly survives in names such as Ar-Pharazôn.
