Because we have a word "language", we assume that there must be some corresponding entity for the word to denote. However, the linguist Saussure points out to us that ‘language is not an entity’. Defining something like ‘The English Language’ turns out to be a difficult task. Part of the problem is that the language has so many different aspects. We can view it as a social fact, as a psychological state, as a set of structures, or as a collection of outputs.
(Laurie Bauer, 2007).
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
Some people believe and write that J.R.R. Tolkien was a linguist, when in fact he was a philologist. That is a linguist, plus a medievalist, plus a paleographer, and his many-sided writings show that he was a fine hobbitologist as well, or if you prefer an anthropologist.
Philology was the word describing the study of the structure and development of languages up the beginning of the XXth century. John Peile (1838-1910) wrote: “It is the science which teaches us what language is” (1877). Today the name Philology is usually restricted to the study of the development of specific languages or language families, especially research into phonological and morphological history based on written documents. The term has never been current in the U.S., except in “New Philology” (cf. James Lockhart’s work), and Linguistics is much more usual. The purpose of Linguistics is the scientific study of languages, and there are, of course, several schools of thought related to it.
When you ask the question “How many languages Tolkien created or constructed?” you're in fact asking “what is a language?” If we take together all the ConLangs Tolkien alluded to in his published writings, we arrive at about forty languages with over fifteen Elvish languages. But if we take into account the Constructed Languages, those having a vocabulary and grammar rules written down, then that number drops to sixteen. Three conlangs lay outside Middle-earth: Naffarin, Gautisk, and Fonwegian. Animalic and Nevbosh, the first two private languages Tolkien used as a teenager, are cryptosystems of English really. Animalic is a codification of the English language, if very fun to use with its rather simple substitution system of words, and the more sophisticated Nevbosh did not break away from ‘English’. Two conlangs have a murky internal status, Nala Lambe and Mágol. Eleven languages were used in and made for Middle-earth: (Common) Eldarin, Quenya, Goldogrin, Noldorin, Sindarin, Telerin, Black Speech, Khuzdul, Adûnaic, Sôval Phare, and Taliska. To that list we should maybe add Valarin, of which so far we have only a few words. To complicate things further, several of these languages had in addition dialects like Gondolinian, Fëanorian, North Sindarin, Exilic Adûnaic, Northern Sôval Phare of the Hobbits, etc. The exact number of ConLangs is difficult to assert. The languages were often described diachronically, with explanations about an old(er) version of a language, like Old Noldorin, and Ancient Quenya, etc. With time, Tolkien changed his view of his personal linguistic aesthetic and ideas of fitness with his own creation, complicating things even further. The grammar rules of Qenya (sic) in The Book of Lost Tales are different from the High-elven language in The Lord of the Rings. These re-constructions are quite distinct from the regular diachronical changes going on inside Middle-earth, and are external to the stories showing Tolkien’s changefulness of mind. Anyone writing about some 'inconsistencies' in Tolkien's Elvish has not studied them properly.
Pr. E. Kloczko