Qenya

Qenya is an early Elvish language created by J. R. R. Tolkien in his fictional world. It refers to a language Tolkien developed in the 1910s and 1920s, later refined into what is commonly called Quenya. In Tolkien’s mature writings the form Quenya is the standard name for the High Elven tongue, while Qenya denotes the original drafts and notes. The distinction between the two terms is commonly made by scholars to separate historical stages of the same language.

In the legendarium, Quenya (often still referred to in its early form as Qenya) is presented as a prestigious, archaic language of the High Elves, used for scholarship, poetry, and ceremonial inscriptions. It is described as morphologically rich, with noun inflections and verb conjugations, a phonemic system featuring long and short vowels, and a preference for a formal, monumental style. The language is depicted as an educated, classical tongue within Elven culture, in contrast with other tongues such as Sindarin.

Because much of Tolkien’s early material is fragmentary or evolved, Qenya is studied mainly by philologists and fans as the ancestor of the fuller Quenya grammar that appears in later publications. The topic remains of interest in Tolkien scholarship and among constructed-language communities, with reference works that trace phonology, vocabulary, and the historical development from Qenya to Quenya.