Anon asked: “Apparently, there are many Elvish languages and I can’t really get them straight. What languages are there, and where (and when) are they spoken?”
So, here you you! A little disclaimer: I didn’t put as much careful research into this as I might have, and it relies more heavily on secondary sources than I generally prefer. But Tolkien wrote so much on language that I could have been in the research stage of this post for weeks and still have tons of work to do. So consider this a sort of quick, casual guide to the realm of elvish linguistics.
PS: The maps are excerpts from Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth
PPS: I didn’t include any of the Sindarin-speaking men in these maps. Technically, the men of Gondor spoke Sindarin, but in their own dialect. But since they aren’t elves, I decided not to include them.
