New Lord of the Rings game recruits film trilogy's linguist to finalize secret Dwarven language that fans have been working on for years

The developers behind an upcoming Lord of the Rings survival-crafting game have teamed up with one of the linguists who worked on the movies to create the secret Dwarven language in its entirety.

That comes from IGN, which reports that The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria developer Free Range Games worked with linguist David Salo to create Khuzdul down to the grammar so you could experience it all in the upcoming game.

Game director Jon-Paul Dumont tells IGN that including the Dwarven language in the game started as a "fun idea" before swiftly snowballing.

"There are some people on the internet that have built their own versions of the language and we were like, 'Oh, maybe we could use these.' And then we realized they weren't based as authentically on Tolkien's work as we wanted," they say.

"We went out to find somebody that could help us write it. And in the act of making it, it became more important than just that cool idea at the beginning. So we were like, 'It'd just be neat if we could say some Dwarven phrases.'

"But as we started to get the first deliveries back from the linguist, and as I started to dig deeper into Tolkien's life, he did what we inadvertently did. He started by building the language and then thinking about, 'Who are the people that have this language?' Then every delivery that came back from the linguist became, 'How can we use this?' This word sounds like it could be a creature that maybe doesn't exist anymore. Let's invent that creature and get it into the game."

Before working on the game, linguist Salo helped put together the languages of Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, taking the vocabulary known from the books and expanding upon it. If you ever needed someone to delve into the dwarven language, you could do far worse!

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria releases on October 24.

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.