Here’s an interesting fact about dwarves: we don’t know their real names. That’s right, all the dwarves you know and love are using aliases. Gimli is not really Gimli. Thorin is not really Thorin. Who knows who Kili and Fili are. Heck, even Durin wasn’t really Durin.
The dwarves, due to their extremely secretive nature, refused to tell non-dwarves their true, personal names - or the personal names of any other dwarves. When dwarves first started forming relationships with the communities of men living nearby, they would use names in the Mannish languages used by those communities. As this tradition solidified, it seems that the dwarves kept using names similar to these first “aliases" - either by reusing family names, or just by keeping to the same naming forms and traditions. This is why the names we see in the later Ages seem so “dwarvish" - though they’re technically Mannish names, the languages spoken by these early men have since died out, so they seem unusual to the men of the later Ages.
Dwarves went so far as to forbid these true, personal, “inner" names from being carved (in case someone who could read Khuzdul saw it), and when telling outsiders the history of their people, they even assigned Mannish names to dwarves long dead (like Durin.)
((I read once on another blog that dwarves believed their inner names to be connected to their souls. This would make sense, seeing as how they saw their language as sacred, having been given to them by Aule. However, the blog didn’t cite any sources, and I haven’t been able to find this in any of my books. If you’ve seen in somewhere, please let me know, as I’d like to know if it’s true or not!))
SOURCES: LOTR Appendix F, History of Middle Earth vol. 12 ("Of Dwarves and Men")
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