Quenya grammar

Quenya is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his fictional universe, Middle-earth.

Here is presented a resume of the grammatical rules of late Quenya as established from Tolkien's writings c. 1951–1973. It is almost impossible to extrapolate the morphological rules of the Quenya tongue from published data because Quenya is a fictional and irregular language that was heavily influenced by natural languages, such as Finnish and Latin, not an international auxiliary language with a regular morphology.

Tolkien wrote several synchronic grammars of Quenya, but only one has been published in full: The Early Qenya Grammar. Apart from that, he wrote several diachronic studies of Quenya and its proto-language Common Eldarin, three of which have been published: The Qenyaqetsa (dealing with early Qenya or Eldarissa), the Outline of Phonetic Development, and the Outline of Phonology.

Late Quenya is a highly inflected language, in which nouns have ten cases and there is a rather regular inflection of verbs. Although the word order is highly flexible, the usual structure is subject–verb–object.