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.

Random quotation

“ It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose. From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such as ghâsh ‘fire’, but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dûr and of the captains of Mordor.

LOTR III, Appendix F, Of other races, p. 1487

Latest news

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I do not publish the full wordlists because the information isn't complete (probably, it will not be until the end of the show) and I'm not good at recognizing the sounds of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

2025-04-01 Important news

Now when I have several armies, Nûrlâm is no longer considered a dialect of Black Speech conlang, but rather an independent constructed language! In the near future all mentions of phrases “dialect” and “Black Speech” will be deleted from the Black Speech School site and it's wiki.

Discuss

2025-03-24 Major revision of dictionary

A lot of words related to directions (left, top, down, etc.) were revisited. Don't worry, very few basic roots were changed, but the grammar was.

During the preparation of the lessons, I've noticed a lot of inconsistences in the words related to directions. For some the basic word was a noun, for others it might be an adjective, preposition, postposition, adverb describing the static position or adverb describing the motion towards. I've decided to unify it, and now all directions' words are based on nouns. The roots themselves were not modified, only how you derive and decline them to express nuances. Some duplicating words were marked as slang. Usually I don't add all the forms of the word to dictionary, but for these direction words I made an exception because grammar became very different from English or Russian.

The new wiki page aggregating them all was made. There will also be a lesson about using direction words someday.

Warning: I had some cloud sync issues, so the updated dictionary files may have some issues. I hope no new words were deleted.