Tolkien also suggests that the nuances behind the inherent mentality and biases of a given culture are embedded within its language, and that such concepts can only truly be communicated inter-culturally via multilingualism. As a philologist, the author masterfully intertwines the parallel evolution of his constructed languages with the very history of Middle-earth itself. Of the languages encountered in The Fellowship of the Ring, Humans and Hobbits speak dialects from the same phyloge- netic family. Sauron and his Ringwraiths speak Black Speech, and the Dwarves natively speak Khuzdul, a language isolate, and so on (Dain). While the mother tongue of most modern Elves throughout the Third Age of Middle-earth is Sindarin, they are still taught to read and write in the language’s ancient predecessor, Quenya; that way, they are able to decipher ancient records with ease and could continue recording history with the same, stagnant language (Fauskanger, “Quenya”). Among other modern and ancient languages, Tolkien studied Old English, or the Anglophone world’s equivalent to Quenya, to better understand the texts and legends of his culture’s past. By bestowing this same form of literary and vernacular diglossia among the Elves, he embraces the profound cultural enrichment of learning one’s heritage language. This idea is further reinforced when a band of migratory Elves is pleasantly surprised that Frodo, a Hobbit, employs his limited knowledge of Quenya with them, prompting them to deem him a worldly “Elf-friend” (Tolkien 106). Here, Tolkien conveys how certain semantic nuances can only ever be transmitted by way of a culture’s native language, and how multilingualism allows for a much more meaningful cultural exchange between Frodo and some Elves with whom he was unfamiliar. That said, the only tongue used for communication between members of Frodo’s company is “Westron,” otherwise known as the “Common Speech” that was spoken “though[out] all the lands of the Kings from Arnor to Gondor” (5). When the original Dúnedain arrived from the Great Sea and settled along the coast of Middle-earth, this simplified, creolized lingua franca emerged from their mother tongue’s contact with the rich vocabulary of the Elven-Tongue and, to a lesser extent, that of a few other bygone coastal idioms (Fauskanger, “Westron”). Tolkien likely modeled this patchwork language genesis to be analogous to that which yielded Early Modern English as a result of the Norse simplification of Anglo-Saxon grammar and the dilution of its native vocabulary by the Franco-Norman nobility. Further, Westron’s status as a post-colonial lingua franca voided its affiliation to any one culture, a phenomenon which likely discouraged multilingualism among its native speakers. Boromir, a monolingual Man of Gondor, is shown to have the greatest difficulty appreciating the cultural diversity of the Fellowship; he is the only one who is sceptical of the Elvish Lady of Lothlórien (466), and – in a fit of anger – he admonishes Frodo for “ruining [his] cause,” for if “any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men, […] not Halflings” (520). Perhaps Tolkien depicts Boromir as a caricature of an overly zealous, closed-minded, monolingual colonizer with no respect whatsoever for the land or its culture. He warns readers of the apathy that accompanies unaddressed cognitive biases and ethnocentrism; further, he encourages them to use the language(s) at their disposal to inquire, share, and learn about others’ realities before drawing any hasty conclusions.