Westron
the Common Speech of the later age
Definition
Westron — the Common Speech of the Third Age — is the great lingua franca of the later period of Middle-earth: the “language of the West” that spread from the remnant Númenóreans of Gondor and Arnor through all the lands between the coasts and the Mountains, becoming the everyday tongue of Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and even the officers of the Shadow. Its ancestor was Adûnaic, the speech of Númenor.
The Speech of the Age
In the fiction of the Red Book, all the events of The Lord of the Rings are reported in Westron, translated by the author into English: the “Common Speech” is the medium in which names like Strider, Samwise, and Bag End are actually to be read, their original Westron forms being “Bree-legend” and the familiar “Rivendell” etc. Tolkien notes that the names recorded in the Red Book are almost entirely Westron or rendered into it. By the time of the War of the Ring, Westron had virtually displaced all other tongues in daily use across Eriador and the south — even the Dwarves spoke it abroad, and the Orcs of Mordor used a debased slang of it.
The Three Translations
In Appendix F Tolkien explains the “translation convention” of the whole legendarium: every character who speaks a language not the reader’s own is given English, Scots-like, or other equivalents — so that all the Common Speech parts of the tale are “Westron”, the language rendered directly. It stands in the design as the practical, mortal, workaday tongue, against the Elvish languages of the high past.
Significance
Westron is the pragmatic centre of the whole Lord of the Rings — the language of the everyday story of Frodo and Sam, which is at once the humble speech of the hobbits and the descendant of the proud Adûnaic of the Númenóreans. In Tolkien’s linguistic frame it proves that the world of the Third Age is entirely a “human world”, spoken in the inheritance of drowned Númenor.