WWU lecture on Tolkein’s language and writing

This is a pretty fascinating 50 mins talk by Edward Vajda on how Tolkien’s love of languages impacted his writing. One of my favourite points he makes is that the names of places and their languages get more exotic the further you go from The Shire. Bree was influence by Welsh, Gondor and Rohan by Scotland and Ireland, Dwarvish has gramatically characteristics similar to Arabic and Hebrew, The East by Turkish and Hungarian languages which were associated with invaders. So basically the languages inform how you perceive those places.