Sindarin Pronunciation

This page is intended to be a complete guide to the sounds of Sindarin. Because of that, it’s super long, and some of what’s here may not seem relevant until you’ve explored the language further. If you get bogged down in the details, there’s also a quick guide that just covers the basics.

Vowels

English-speakers tend to think of there being five vowels: A, E, I, O, and U. However, these are just the vowel letters. English has way more than five vowel sounds. Just look at this list:

Pete poot pit put pate pout pet putt pat pot pike poke

Sindarin doesn’t have English’s huge variety of sounds. In Sindarin, the five main vowels A, E, I, O, and U are always pronounced the same way.

The Big Five

Pronounce Sindarin A, E, I, O, U as ah, eh, ee, oh, oo. Tolkien was aiming for familiarity here: Spanish, Italian, and many other languages have similar vowel systems.

Even English sometimes uses the five vowels with their Sindarin pronunciations:

• A: “father”
• E: “well”
• I: “machine”
• O: “for”
• U: “brute”

With those examples in mind, try pronouncing these words:

• ungol spider
• lembas waybread
• Legolas Greenleaf
• Osgiliath Citadel of the Stars

The Sixth Vowel: Y

In addition to the five main vowels, Sindarin has a sixth vowel Y with no equivalent in English. It’s the sound of u in French lune, or ü in German über. To pronounce it, say ee but with your lips rounded as if saying oo.

If those instructions sound nonsensical, it’s because ee usually stretches your lips into a smile, basically the opposite of oo. (That’s why people say cheese for photos!) However, the other important feature of ee is that your mouth is nearly closed when saying it, leaving only a small air gap above your tongue. So combine that closeness with lip-rounding and you have the Sindarin Y sound.

Accents and Vowel Length

An acute accent (á é í ó ú) indicates that the vowel is held for a slightly longer duration. So in a word like míriel sparkling like jewels, the first syllable mí is held about twice as long as the second syllable ri.

A circumflex (â ê î ô û) also indicates a long vowel, but is mostly used in words of one syllable. This may just be an aesthetic whim of Tolkien’s, though he justified it by saying that vowels with the circumflex should be held even longer. However, the Elvish writing systems only distinguish two vowel lengths, long and short, so the Elves must not have considered this detail very important.

Diphthongs

A diphthong (pronounced DIFF-thong, from the Greek for two sounds) is a combination of two vowel sounds that blur together into a single syllable. Diphthongs appear frequently in English, like the ou in house that starts with an ah sound and ends with an oo sound. Sindarin has a similar diphthong, spelled au.

Here is the complete list of Sindarin diphthongs:

• AI: as in “aisle”
• AE: no English equivalent. AE is a glide from an A into an E. The resulting sound should be similar to AI; Tolkien even suggested pronouncing AE the same as AI if you’re not picky. Or you could aim for a Mirkwood accent and pronounce it like E: compare Mirkwood Legolas to Classical Sindarin Laegolas.
• AU or AW: like ou in “house”. AU and AW are simply variant spellings of the same sound.
• EI: as in “weigh”
• OE: like oy in “boy”, but ending in an eh sound.
• UI: as in ruin, but ending in a tense ee sound rather than the ih sound. Tolkien noted that this was a long diphthong and scanned as two syllables in poetry: hence Fanuilos, le linnathon in the Hymn to Elbereth, where the meter requires eight syllables per line.

Consonants

Voiced and Voiceless Sounds

Sindarin has several pairs of consonant sounds that differ by being voiced or voiceless—voice being a linguistics term meaning vibration of the vocal cords. Don’t be worried by the terminology, though. If you can speak English, you’re already pronouncing voiced and voiceless sounds all the time. You can feel the buzzing of your vocal cords if you put your hand on your throat and say ZZZ. If you then turn the Z into an S, the buzzing stops. Voiced sounds like Z or V have a buzzing or humming quality, while their voiceless counterparts S and F sound more like a hiss or whisper. (In fact, voicelessness is the defining feature of whispering. Try whispering loudly; your speech may be audible but you’ll be pronouncing all the sounds voicelessly.

Voiced/voiceless pairs in English include:

• Voiced V, voiceless F: veil vs. fail
• Voiced Z, voiceless S: zoo vs. sue
• Voiced J, voiceless CH: gin vs. chin
• Voiced D, voiceless T: deal vs. teal
• Voiced G, voiceless K: got vs. caught
• Voiced B, voiceless P: bun vs. pun

Sindarin has many of the same pairs as English, but some won’t be familiar:

• Voiced R, voiceless RH
• Voiced L, voiceless LH
• Voiced W, voiceless HW

I’ll describe all of these in the giant list of consonants below.

The Consonants of Sindarin

• B: as in English.
• C: always hard, as in cat. Celeborn is pronounced Keleborn, not Seleborn.
• CH: as in Scottish loch or German Bach. If you have a hard time replicating this sound, you could pronounce it like H or K, as the Gondorians did. In the Gondor dialect the place-name Rochann was pronounnced as if the ch were an h—hence the spelling Rohan in LotR.
• D: as in English, except in the combination DH, below.
• DH: like the th in weather. This is a voiced sound; contrast with voiceless TH. If you have trouble keeping the DH/TH distinction straight, remember that DH is like Z pronounced with an exaggerated lisp.
• F: usually pronounced as in English, but at the end of a word it sounds like V (think English of). The word nef on this side of is pronounced nev as in English never. This quirk of spelling probably hearkens back to Tolkien’s fondness for Welsh, where f has a V-sound.
• H: as in English—though it often combines with other letters: see CH, DH, HW, LH, RH, TH.
• HW: the wh sound of whale, in varieties of English that pronounce it differently from wail. This is a voiceless version of W.
• I: is normally a vowel but moonlights as a consonant. When it appears before another vowel at the beginning of a word, it sounds like the Y in yes. So ionnath sons and Ioreth Old Woman begin with a yo sound.
• M: as in English.
• P: as in English.
• PH: as in photograph. In the middle of a word, it represents a lengthened F-sound: a word like ephel outer fence would be pronounced ef-fel.
• N: as in English.
• NG at the end of a word is the sound heard in sing. Elsewhere it represents the same sound plus a hard G, as in finger.
• G: is always hard, as in get. Sindarin doesn’t have the J-sound heard in gem.
• L: always as in let, with the tip of the tongue touching or just behind the upper teeth. In English, L is sometimes pronounced with the tongue bunched up in the back of the mouth, as in cold, but this variant of L does not exist in Sindarin.
• LH: the sound of LL in Welsh Llewellyn—a peculiar sound, if you’ve not heard it before. To pronounce it, put your tongue in a position to say L, and blow gently. The resulting sound should be somewhere between th and sl (in fact, the LH sound developed from earlier SL, found in Old Sindarin).
• R: trilled, as in Spanish. In Appendix E, Tolkien notes that the back-of-the-throat R-sound heard in French or German was not used by the Elves.
• RH: a Sindarin R-sound pronounced voicelessly. If you can pronounce R and HW, you’re halfway to pronouncing RH. Just pronounce R while exhaling breathily as for HW.
• S: never sounds like Z, as it often does in English at the end of a word. It is always pronounced as in sets.
• T: as in English.
• TH: the sound of th in thin. This is a voiceless sound, contrasting with voiced DH.
• V: as in English.
• W: as in English. W can occur at the end of a word in Sindarin, where it is pronounced as a very short U sound: têw letter.

Splitting Up Letter Combinations

The combinations DH, LH, RH, TH sometimes represent a sequence of two distinct sounds, e.g. T+H. For example, Panthael (Fullwise, a name given to Sam Gamgee by Aragorn), is a compound pant+hael, so the t and h represent distinct sounds. Similarly, Edhelharn Elfstone, is a compound edhel+harn.

How do you know when to pronounce the letter-sequence th as T+H, and when to pronounce it as a single sound? The answer, unfortunately, is that you just have to recognize the rare cases where th represents T+H.

It’s worth noting that the sounds LH and RH cannot occur in the middle of a word, so if you see a word like Edhelharn or Perhael Halfwise, you know that the H should be a separate sound.

Tengwar writing doesn’t have this ambiguity, because the sounds DH, LH, RH, TH each have their own symbol. So recognizing letter combinations that should be split up isn’t just relevant for pronunciation—you need to know this to write in tengwar, as well!

Stress

Sindarin, like English, puts emphasis or stress on one syllable of multi-syllable words. In English, stress can alter the meaning of a word, as in the following:

Sam received a present from Galadriel. Galadriel will present the hobbits with lembas.

With the first syllable stressed, “present” is a noun. Stress the second syllable, “present”, and it becomes a verb.

In Sindarin, the stress of a word can’t change its meaning, but it’s vital to learn how words are stressed in order to write poetry. If you don’t pronounce words with the right stress, you’ll just sound weird.

Fortunately, Sindarin stress is predicatable from the shape of the word, so you don’t have to memorize where the stress falls for each word individually. This section describes how to figure out which syllable is stressed.

Syllables

Before you can place the stress in a word, you have to break it down into syllables. The syllables or beats of a word are determined by the vowels. Each syllable has exactly one vowel or diphthong at its core—no more, no less. So Elbereth Gilthoniel breaks down as El·be·reth Gil·tho·ni·el. Thranduil has only two syllables, Thran·duil, because ui is a diphthong.

Stress in Two-Syllable Words

Tolkien states in Appendix E that [i]n words of two syllables, [the stress] falls in practically all cases on the first syllable. However, he neglects to list any Sindarin exceptions to this rule, so for our purposes, two-syllable Sindarin words are always stressed on the first syllable. Thus we have Per·hael Samwise, El·rond.

Stress in Longer Words

The general rule for longer words is to stress the third-to-last syllable: El·be·reth, Gil·tho·ni·el, Le·go·las

However, the second-to-last syllable gets the stress if its vowel is:

• long (accented), as í in Celebrían (Silver-queen, Arwen’s mother)
• a diphthong, as ae in Hithaeglir (the Misty Mountains)
• or followed by multiple consonants: Celebrimbor (Silver-fist)

Note that in the last case, it’s consonant sounds and not letters that are important. TH, DH, etc. are single sounds even though they’re represented by two letters, so the th in Nimbrethil doesn’t cause the stress to move.

Possible Exceptions to the Stress Rule

There are some Sindarin names that don’t seem to follow the stress rules in Appendix E, among them Imladris (Rivendell) and Nargothrond. These should be stressed Imladris, Nargothrond, because the second-to-last syllable of each is followed by two consonants. However, we can observe that both are stressed on the first syllable in poetry. I’ve written at length about this issue here.