Native Tongue (novel)

Native Tongue is the first novel in Suzette Haden Elgin's feminist science fiction series of the same name. The trilogy is centered in a future dystopian American society where the 19th Amendment has been repealed and women have been stripped of civil rights. A group of women, part of a world-wide group of linguists who facilitate human communication with alien races, create a new language for women as an act of resistance. Elgin created the language, Láadan, and instructional materials are available.

Elgin has said about the book:

Native Tongue was a thought experiment, with a time limit of

ten years. My hypothesis was that if I constructed a

language designed specifically to provide a more adequate

mechanism for expressing women's perceptions, women would (a)

embrace it and begin using it, or (b) embrace the idea but not

the language, say "Elgin, you've got it all wrong!" and

construct some other "women's language" to replace it. The ten

years went by, and neither of those things happened; Láadan got

very little attention, even though SF3 actually published its

grammar and dictionary and I published a cassette tape to go with

it. Not once did any feminist magazine (or women's magazine) ask

me about the language or write a story about it.

The Klingon language, which is as "masculine" as you could

possibly get, has had a tremendous impact on popular

culture -- there's an institute, there's a journal, there

were bestselling grammars and cassettes, et cetera, et

cetera; nothing like that happened with Láadan. My

hypothesis therefore was proved invalid, and the conclusion I

draw from that is that in fact women (by which I mean women who

are literate in English, French, German, and Spanish, the

languages in which Native Tongue appeared) do not find

human languages inadequate for communication. ^[1]

[edit] See also

This article about a 1980s science fiction novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.