Quenya is the chief language of the High Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium.
Tolkien developed Quenya as an artistic language, drawing much of its sound and structure from languages such as Finnish and Latin. In the fictional history of Middle-earth, it was associated especially with the Elves who had lived in Valinor and with formal, historical, or ceremonial speech.
Quenya is often confused with Sindarin, another major Elvish language created by Tolkien. Sindarin became the more widely spoken Elven language in much of Middle-earth during the later ages. Tolkien worked on both languages for decades, refining vocabulary, grammar, and historical relationships between them. Because his languages belong to a wider invented history, their development continued even when particular stories and published texts changed.