The Elves are the fictional people associated with Sindarin and Quenya in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Sindarin and Quenya are Tolkien’s best-known Elvish languages. Sindarin became the everyday Elven language of much of Middle-earth, while Quenya was an older and more formal language associated especially with the High Elves. Tolkien designed both with historical relationships, sound patterns, and grammatical structures rather than treating them as collections of isolated fantasy words.
The languages are related but not interchangeable. Their differences reflect the imagined migrations and histories of the Elves, much as real-world languages develop into related branches over time. Sindarin was influenced by Tolkien’s interest in Welsh, while Quenya drew heavily on features inspired by Finnish, along with other linguistic influences. Dwarves, Ents, and Orcs have their own languages or speech traditions in Tolkien’s legendarium, but they are not the principal speakers of these two famous Elvish languages. The distinction also helps explain why names and poems in the books can sound different even when they refer to related people or places.