At one time, Hobbits lived close to northern peoples of Men in the Vales of Anduin, where they shared a common Mannish language. As the years passed, events conspired to drive these two peoples apart: the Hobbits passed westward across the Misty Mountains, while the Northmen, after much travelling through Middle-earth, settled at last in the southern land that came to be called Rohan.
Among the Shire-hobbits, their old language was displaced by the Westron or Common Speech, but the Hobbits retained some of their old words (like smial or mathom, as well as the names of days and months). Because of their common heritage, the Hobbits who visited Rohan discovered that they could recognise many of the words in that land's ancestral language.
Tolkien represents this ancestral language of the Hobbits and Rohirrim as Old English: a suitable comparison, because that early Mannish speech formed a basis of the Westron in much the same way that Old English was a vital element in the evolution of modern English. That does not mean, of course, that Hobbits actually spoke Old English: they lived long, long before that language appeared. Hobbit-speech itself was quite distinct and alien in nature (to our ears), though little of the actual language survives apart from a few personal and place names.
The term 'Hobbit-speech' does not only apply to the ancestral language of the Hobbits, but also to their use of the Common Speech. This Westron tongue was spoken across western Middle-earth, but in the pastoral Shire, the Hobbits developed their own patterns of usage.
One change that is specifically recorded relates to the use of pronouns. Most users of the Common Speech differentiated between a familiar and a deferential form (somewhat like the difference between tu and vous in French). In the Shire, the deferential form had fallen almost completely out of use, and the familiar was used in almost all circumstances (rather as you came to be used almost universally in English).2 So, when Peregrin Took met the Ruling Steward of Gondor, he addressed him as a familiar acquaintance rather than a lord, a quirk of usage that caused a degree of consternation among the Gondorians.
Notes
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Dating the origins and duration of the early Hobbit-speech is difficult, as no records exist of the Hobbits' time in the Vales of Anduin. They began to travel out of that land from about the year III 1050, so the Hobbit-speech must have existed during the first millennium of the Third Age.
While the language of the Hobbits was explicitly connected with the tongue used by the Rohirrim, this date of III 1050 shows that they cannot have learned the language directly from that people. The ancestors of the Rohirrim, then known as the Men of the Éothéod, only began to make their way into the Vales of Anduin from III 1856, centuries after the Hobbits had left. Thus the Hobbit-speech must have been influenced by another earlier group of Northmen of the same general stock, rather than the people who would one day become the Rohirrim.
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2 |
Just as the Shire-hobbits merged their pronouns, so did early speakers of English. At one time English had two forms of the second-person pronoun, thou for singular or familiar use, and you for plural or deferential use. Over time the two merged, and thou is essentially extinct in modern English. The English pronouns merged in the opposite direction to those of the Hobbit-speech: while the Hobbits made the familiar form dominant, in English the deferential you became dominant over the familiar form. Another difference is that the Common Speech also had familiar and deferential forms for third-person pronouns (equivalent to words like he, she, it or they), a feature that never existed in English.
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- Updated 13 July 2025
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