The Developers of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria Created Tolkien’s Secret Dwarven Language

ign.com:

The developers of The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria took a frankly over-the-top approach with their Fourth Age-set Dwarven-focused survival-crafting game: they created the entire secret Dwarven language just so players can hear their characters use it in-game.

While Tolkien fans have worked to develop the Dwarven language, called Khuzdul, over the years, the developers at Free Range Games went one step further and worked with a linguist to create a full Khuzdul grammar.

That linguist is David Salo, who worked on the languages of Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies, expanding the languages (particularly Sindarin, one of the languages spoken by the Elves) by building on vocabulary already known from published works, and defining some languages that previously had a small published vocabulary.

This collaboration created a full lexicon and a full grammar of Khuzdul, game director Jon-Paul Dumont told IGN in an interview at gamescom 2023. Free Range Games used this to recreate Khuzdul in-game. It means that when you create your dwarf, you can choose to tell it to always speak Khuzdul.

Khuzdul extends to Return to Moria’s eye-catching singing mechanic. Sometimes your dwarf will have ‘inspiration’ and burst into song, a buff that may, for example, lighten the burden of mining. Some songs were written by Tolkien himself. Some are sung completely in the dwarven language.

According to Dumont, the inclusion of the Dwarven language started out as “just a fun idea”, but quickly snowballed. “There are some people on the internet that have built their own versions of the language and we were like, ‘oh, maybe we could use these.’ And then we realised they weren't based as authentically on Tolkien's work as we