Khuzdul
the secret tongue of the Dwarves
Definition
Khuzdul is the secret tongue of the Dwarves — the speech given to them by Aulë the Smith when he made the Seven Fathers in the darkness beneath the earth. It is a harsh, consonantal, “rock-strong” tongue, alien to the Elves (who found it “uncouth”), and it changed little over thousands of years, for the Dwarves held it apart and true to their first making.
A Secret Kept
The Dwarves would not teach Khuzdul even to their closest friends; no Elf or Man ever learned it fully, and its words were never written for strangers. Their personal names in the world were not Dwarvish: each Dwarf bore a “true” Khuzdul name kept secret, and used an outer name “meant for foreign ears” — which is how the names of the Dwarf-heroes have come down to the later ages in Westron and other tongues. The word Khazâd (“Dwarves”) is the one Dwarvish word known widely — in the great cry of the Dwarf-king at the Hornburg, “The Dwarves are upon you!” the name of the race resounds.
In the Ages
Khuzdul was the speech of the Dwarves from their awakening before the Elves (in the Elder Days of Arda) through the Ages; it survived the falls of Khazad-dûm and the wanderings of Durin’s Folk, who in exile still “spoke their own tongue among themselves”. In the later age the Dwarves of Erebor used the Common Speech abroad, but kept Khuzdul as the language of their own halls and councils.
Significance
Khuzdul is the language of a second, secret Children — a tongue deliberately made “unlovely” to outsiders as the Dwarves themselves were: private, enduring, and rooted in the stone of the earth. In Tolkien’s linguistic design it stands apart from the Elvish stem (it is not of the Eldarin family), a testimony to the separate creation and profound otherness of the Dwarves.