As soon as you learn that Middle-Earth is a fictional alternate prehistory to our Earth, you then want to know who to compare everyone else to. This is easily one of the most difficult tasks I ever assigned myself: What are the enemy Mortal Human cultures in Middle-Earth, of Rhun and Harad, based on?

To be frank, I honestly am not entirely sure, but since Tolkien was a linguistic anthropologist of a sort, looking at the phonemes of their words would provide clues.

I noticed that there were three Easterling words: Khand and Variag. "Khand" is a Hindi word for "realm", and "Variag" is derived from Old Norse for "mercenary". The Easterling name "Khamul" looks like an exoticized spelling of the Gaelic word for "crooked mouth" or "crooked one".

Then there are two Haradrim Words: "Mumak" and "Umbar". "Mumak" short for the Arabic phrase, "mumak-kinu", means "provider of place". "Umbar" is also Arabic: It is a word that was once often used to designate a sacred or holy place.

Here we hit a little road block: First of all, it appears that the good men of Middle-Earth also speak Indo-European languages of the Germanic family, and the Haradrim aren't much like Arabs when it comes to their Mumakil.

But it's not as simple as that. They do not all represent any one existent culture, and this is obvious when
one learns the true surprising nature of Westron. At the last appendix of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explains that none of the characters spoke English or a word any Indo-European language, he just made the common speech English, and "translated" its distant ancestor, Rohirric, from an even more alien language into a more familiar one, Old English. He gave some root words of Westron, "Calimac", "nin", and others, and I looked them up, and they all fit morphems of difficult-to-classify languages like Chinese and Basque, which have be theorized to have all once been descended from the same language tens of thousands of years ago, before they deiverged to near-unrecognizability, and are classified by some to belong in the macro-family, "Dené–Caucasian" These also tend to account as some of the oldest languages known.

So, the men of the West actually spoke languages similar to ones in the Vasconic and North Caucasian language families, and the Haradrim and Easterlings spoke languages in the theorized macro-family of the "Nostratic Macro-family", and in the case of the Easterlings, spoke some Proto-Indo-European or Eurasiatic, and the Haradrim might have spoke a Proto-Afroasiastic language. They don't represent a single culture, but some cultural ideals and lifestyles, the Easterlings, being, depending on the cultures, like Scythians, Persians, and Aryans (not the Nazi kind), and the Haradrim being like Phoenicians, Berbers, and Arabs.

It is odd that the languages of the "good guy" humans were "translated" into European ones, and this begs a question: If the Gondorians didn't speak a language akin to English, but the Easterlings may have, does this mean that the Easterlings eventually took over Gondor and the self-governances under it? Perhaps they did.