Quenya Translator

What is Quenya?

Quenya is an Elvish language built by a philologist who worked on it for around sixty years, from roughly 1910 until his death in 1973. The word Quenya itself just means "language" or "Elvish language". Finnish was a big influence, along with Latin and Greek, which is where its open vowels, long flowing words and system of ten noun cases come from.

If you want a Quenya translator for names, poems or a tattoo idea, the honest caveat is that the language is only partly recorded. Its creator never wrote enough vocabulary for fluent conversation, so modern words have to be built from known roots.

How to translate English to Quenya

Type your sentence, choose Quenya and press Translate. Established words and phrases are used where they exist, for example aiya for "hail" and namárië for "farewell", which comes from a phrase meaning "be well". Where nothing fits, the AI builds a word from known roots and explains how. The result includes an IPA pronunciation and a speaker button.

Quenya pronunciation and script

Stress falls on the second-to-last syllable if that syllable is heavy, otherwise on the one before it, and vowels come in short and long forms. Quenya can be written in the Latin alphabet, which is what you get here, or in an elegant script called Tengwar.

There are two main Elvish languages. Quenya is the older, ceremonial one. Sindarin is the everyday one, with a different sound, so if you like this one, try that next.

Phrases to try in Quenya

• Greetings, bright star of our meeting.Try it
• The stars shine over the sea.Try it
• May peace be with you.Try it
• I love you more than words can say.Try it
• Farewell, until we meet again.Try it

Questions about the Quenya translator

Learn more about Quenya

• Quenya (Wikipedia)
• Eldamo, an Elvish lexicon