Native Tongue

Native Tongue #1

by Suzette Haden Elgin

Called "fascinating" by the New York Times upon its first publication in 1984, Native Tongue won wide critical praise and cult status, and has often been compared to the futurist fiction of Margaret Atwood. Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth's wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists--a small, clannish group of families--have become the ruling elite by controlling all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect translators for all the galaxies' languages.

Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the children's language education, running the compound, and caring for the elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men's control.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Feminism, Dystopia, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy

327 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Suzette Haden Elgin was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

Born in 1936 in Missouri, Elgin attended the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in the 1960s, and began writing science fiction in order to pay tuition. She has a Ph.D. in linguistics, and was the first UCSD student to ever write two dissertations (on English and Navajo). She created the engineered language Láadan for her Native Tongue science fiction series. A grammar and dictionary was published in 1985. She is a supporter of feminist science fiction, saying "women need to realize that SF is the only genre of literature in which it's possible for a writer to explore the question of what this world would be like if you could get rid of [X], where [X] is filled in with any of the multitude of real world facts that constrain and oppress women. Women need to treasure and support science fiction." [1]

In addition, she published works of shorter fiction. Overlying themes in her work include feminism, linguistics and the impact of language, and peaceful coexistence with nature. Many of her works also draw from her Ozark background and heritage.

Elgin became a professor at her alma mater's cross-town rival, San Diego State University (SDSU). She retired in 1980.

Reviews

[Wealhtheow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely excellent. I know The Handmaid's Tale gets more press and praise, but this is a far more realistic and chilling misogynist future. There's really so much meaty stuff, and I'm so far from eloquent, that I'll just say read it and leave it at that.

[Althea Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for book club.

OK, first off: Suzette Haden Elgin is clearly a separatist, who believed that both women and men would be better off apart from each other. (Not that she seemed to care much about what might be better for men.)
I do not agree with this premise (not even a tiny bit) - but I'm not demeriting the book for holding a viewpoint I disagree with.

There are some interesting ideas brought up - but most of them are dropped, never to be picked up again. Elgin was a linguist, and as such, did have some interesting thoughts about language acquisition and communication.

However - it's just not a very good book. The language is clunky and awkward, giving the book a feel more like it was published in the 50s than in the 80s. One of the members of my book club theorized that this was done on purpose (a theory bolstered by the fact that language was Elgin's professional specialty!), but I have read one other book by her, published over a decade earlier, and that one was pretty similar in tone and style. (And it was even worse, as a work of literature. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) So I'm concluding that this was just her writing 'voice.'

The premise of the book is that in a near future, when Earth has made contact with multitudes of alien races, communicating with those races in order to hammer out trade agreements has become of primary economic importance. It has been discovered that the only way to communicate with humanoid aliens is to have them send a representative who will interact with a human infant, until that infant picks up the alien language as its 'native tongue.' Only the babies of thirteen Linguist families, who all live in communal houses on Earth, are trained to this important work. Both the Linguists and the larger Earth culture have become extremely misogynistic: women have the status of slaves. However, the Linguist women have been secretly working on creating a "Womens' Language" which they see as the tool of their liberation.

Well, Elgin may have been a linguist, but she certainly was not an economist or a sociologist. The whole situation, as described, feels very poorly thought out.

We have the Linguists, for one. They are the tiny group on which the entire human economy (not just Earth, but a plethora of colonies, which, we are told, are easy and cheap to travel to) depends on. However, they are portrayed as a hated group who have to pretend to be poor and live in ascetic, horrid situations, denying themselves even the smallest luxuries, in order to avoid inciting more hatred. This is just ridiculous. In reality, they'd be like oligarchs (as someone in my book club said) and would not care at all if they were loved or hated. They could have their own private planets, if they wanted.

Similarly - the linguist women are half of the Linguists. They are needed, desperately. Sure, they've been brought up to be slaves, but they're already shown as being smart, savvy, and secretly rebellious. They could also go on strike. Hell, they could've applied for political asylum from another humanoid species - we're explicitly told that other planets' cultures have gender equality. It just doesn't make sense with the author's givens, why they'd just do as they were told.

For that matter though, it doesn't make sense why the Linguists have their monopoly. We're specifically told it's not a genetic difference that gives them their abilities. Sure, people think talking to aliens is 'icky' and 'taboo' - but if the government is willing to experiment and sacrifice non-linguist babies to try to open up communication with non-humanoid aliens (so far, an impossibility), why on earth wouldn't they do the same to break the Linguist monopoly on communication with humanoid aliens?

Speaking of the "impossibility" of communication with non-humanoid aliens, the most ridiculous part of the book is when the baby physically self-destructs because it can't understand the alien language. It was just like those old TV shows where something is entered into a computer and it goes "Does Not Compute... Does Not Compute..." and then blows up. This is just not how lack of comprehension works. (It's not how computers work, either.)

For a book prominently featuring the idea of communication with aliens, it's also quite disappointing that there is not one single alien character developed. We don't know how a single alien thinks; what their cultures want, or how or why they are sending representatives to Earth to teach babies their languages. None do any real interacting with any of the characters. Big missed opportunity....

Last complaint... the ending. I really wanted it all to end with the women speaking the new language, and making all the men 'blow up' like the baby did. But it didn't happen. Instead, the men decide that they want to send the women away so they don't have to deal with them, and the women are happy. But they're still subservient, not truly liberated. It was completely anti-climactic and disappointing.

From this review, there's a good possibility I should've read this instead: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[DivaDiane SM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in the late 90’s, when a listserv book club called The Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopia book club run by Laura Quilter I was a part of till it closed up shop. The group had a lot of well-known (ish) authors and academics. I’m not sure why they let me in, but it was great just being a fly on the wall! We did not read this book but it was on everyone’s must read lists for the field.

I remember enjoying it, being fascinated by the ideas. I have not gotten around to reading the sequels.

Now that the SFFBC sub-group challenge is going to read it, I’m looking forward to rereading it and then carrying on.

[Rhiannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had an amazing concept. It was full of amazing ideas (the creation of a secret language for an oppressed second class - women). But, it lacked several things, in my opinion, that prevented it from living up to the proclamation: "feminist science fiction classic."

One of those things was characterization. The first one hundred or so pages in the book had no distinct character for the reader to engage with. There are several plot points expounded in male points of view that readers are supposed to be disgusted by (and are disgusted by!); there is one storyline involving a woman, lacking any real depth, killing out of revenge; and then, there is the mention of some other characters who may be important later. That's it.

In my opinion, having no characters with any emotional depth for the reader to latch onto at the beginning of the story was a serious flaw. It made the pace slow, and frustrated my sense of who or what to believe in in this story.

Another problem I had with this book was the "good guys/bad guys" dichotomy applied by the author. It's simple: All women are good (even the one lady who systematically kills people), all men are bad (even the one guy who appeared to treat a female character like she was equal in intellect and status). I, personally, don't like my contemporary fiction to be so black/white. It is boring, and it is not believable. It narrows the reader's frame of mind and ability to objectively engage with the work. And, if done kind of poorly (as it was here - killing babies! C'mon!), it comes off as petty and trite: an authorial position, a fable, a one-dimensional opinion piece - and not a work of fiction.

The final problem that I had with the book was this - the notion that women should have their own language in the first place. Don't get me wrong! I love imagining the subversive power that a secret language has for the oppressed secondary citizen! It was wonderfully done, and very inspiring! But...

Elgin, and by extension, her characters, believe that one's native language creates one's reality - how one perceives the world (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), and allowing the women in this story to create and use their OWN language will change their reality. I am all for that notion, ladyface!

The problem with all this is that Elgin really believes - IN REAL LIFE - that women should have a language separate from men. And - in doing so - that we would be essentially better off as separate from them altogether? (What's up, Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman-Radical-Crazypants?)

She believes there are things one can experience as a woman that men could not possibly conceive of. We-ellllllll....

1. There are things that an other experiences that a member of an elite, ruling, or "mainstream" class could not possibly conceive of, true... But, women are not the only other in any conceivable reality, and sometimes, even if they are the other in one reality, they may be the elite, ruling, mainstream in another (in Elgin's case, see: female linguists v. female non-linguists - who dictates what language is/means/can be in that scenario? A-hem, linguists. So, already female non-linguists are the double-other, yes?)

2. The notion of putting "Experience Before Language" and writing "outside of the patriarchy" is a nifty one (Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Showalter)...But, does it call for an entirely new language, or simply a new way of USING language? See, the manipulation of a language already existing is, in my opinion, the more subversive and empowering act...

3. The terms that Elgin includes in her Laadan Dictionary seem to be:
I. several ways of experiencing empathy
II. descriptions of situations that make one feel overworked and unappreciated
III. different ways that a body is touched, wants to be touched, doesn't want to be touched

I find these to be somewhat generalized as "female" concepts. They border a tad on the side of the insulting. This is because these are HUMAN concepts, and can occur with MEN as much as they can with WOMEN. They have simply been ASSOCIATED with WOMEN, as a "norm," and not ALLOWED to be ASSOCIATED with men - because of the SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER.

Right? Guys? You experience empathy, right? You feel unappreciated? You sometimes want to be touched, or are uncomfortable when someone is trying to touch you, right? But, you're not allowed to talk about it, because doing so would be UNMANLY, right? Michael Kimmel? Are you there? Can you hear me? Let's all talk about this. In English. Our language. Together.

Overall, I would recommend this book for its interesting obsession with language and reality. For its "Oh no, they didn't!" factor. But, Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) did it better: she gave us better reasons for these fucked behaviors, gave us a couple of good men to save our faith in the HUMAN race, made me love Offred (sorry, Nazareth, not gonna happen), and made me cry. She wins.

[Warwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Linguistics is often an appealing subject for sci-fi, offering a chance to apply its principles to completely new and (literally) alien examples. China Miéville's Embassytown revolves around a species which speaks through two mouths simultaneously (so characters are called things like ᴱᶻ⁄ᵣₐ) and whose language is incapable of untruths; Ted Chiang's ‘Story of Your Life’ (the basis for the Villeneuve film Arrival) concerns the translation of an alien language which operates in the past, present and future simultaneously.

Annoyingly, these ideas tend to be, even hypothetically speaking, linguistically nonsense, which most of the time is totally fine for a sci-fi story. I had higher hopes for Native Tongue, though, just because Suzette Haden Elgin actually had a PhD in linguistics – and it's true that, to the extent that we learn anything about Láadan (the language of this novel), it makes sense. But we learn almost nothing about it – in fact I'm not sure a single word of Láadan appears in the book, and there's only very minimal discussion of its features. I found this a bit frustrating given that the creation of this language is what the whole book is about.

Native Tongue is set in the 22nd century, after the US Constitution has formally declared women to be inferior to men. Earth is in contact with an increasing number of alien species, whose languages must be decoded in order to make interplanetary trade deals: society has become dominated by a hereditary group of Linguist families, who are hated by the general population for their elite status.

I just found a lot of the details a bit baffling or contradictory. Women are subjugated, yet still work important jobs as linguists. The linguist families are known to exist outside the US as well, yet women's status is supposedly based on the US Constitution; what's going on with women in Europe or elsewhere? The men are so cartoonishly misogynistic and stupid that it's a bit difficult to take it seriously. And the linguistic details are…unnecessarily outré (for instance, we learn that when a baby is exposed to a ‘non-humanoid’ alien language, it physically explodes from non-compatibility). Elgin's writing is also extremely clunky.

It's instructive to compare this with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which came out the following year, and which is subtler, more nuanced, and a lot more plausible as a feminist dystopia. Also, since it's a lot better written than this is, it even seems to have more to say about language than this does. Native Tongue is worth a read because its ideas are so interesting, but the execution falls a long way short.

[Kaion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noting the passing last week of Suzette Haden Elgin: linguist, verbal self-defense teacher, feminist genre writer, & founder of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I read Native Tongue in my first push of reading harder sci-fi a few years ago, and found her approach to the genre really eye-opening. Though perhaps her hopes for the embrace of a universal, revolutionary women's language were disappointed, her writing was proof enough of how writing can change perception.

R.I.P. Suzette Haden Elgin: Author, Poet, Verbal Self-Defense Coach [io9]
______________________________________

To make something “appear" is called magic, is it not? [...] There is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow.

I will name the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind— perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of your athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you perceive the athad of every that person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair [...] I have made the athad appear... now it exists.

Native Tongue is a spectacular example of ‘idea’ science-fiction. Its ideas are about feminism and aliens and human expansion, but the most important ones are on the power of language.

In Suzette Haden Elgin’s dystopia, women’s rights regressed in the later 20th century in a bout of religious fervor and neo-conservatism. Two centuries into the future, women are legally “minors”: maintained under the guardanship of male relatives at all times and lacking basic rights. Seen as lesser beings, they are valued only for their labor and reproductive abilities. Meanwhile, humans have expanded through the galaxy, through colonization and trade with Alien worlds. This contact is largely facilitated through the work of “Lingoes”, fifteen Earth-bound linguist families (“Lines”) who have specialized and monopolized the business of Ali-Human translation and diplomacy.

Despite their education, the women in the Lines are as oppressed as those outside, perhaps even more so under the strict patriarchal order of the Lines. In addition to the the usual indignities (labor exploitation, denial of liberty, etc), they also lack reproductive liberty: forced to bear as many children as possible in order to meet the unsatiable demand for imperialistic expansion. But the women of the Lines are working on a secret project that may change all that— Láadan, a new "female" language that they hope will one day unite all the women of the galaxy.

Why? Elgin holds a Ph.D in linguistics, and Native Tongue plays on the idea that human languages themselves, used for countless years in a patriarchal context, are indeed major tools of female repression. On the same note, language can be the tool of female empowerment, and importance of creating words for the expression of female PoV, for concepts previously inexpressible, such as:

raimmelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intentions; especially when it’s clear that someone badly wants to ask—for example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it.

is tantamount. It is the “magic” that is creation of the world anew, and this insurgent potential of language that holds together Native Tongue’s disparate themes around the journeys of Nazareth Chornyak, a young woman of the Lines who's been spotted the have great potential, and Michaela Landry, a nurse whose trained demeanor masks her mission of revenge against those who killed her young son.

Elgin's dystopia addresses other themes such as human expansion driven by resource scarcity and the limits of human perception and language acquisition. But it is the parts of Native Tongue that are most concerned with the creation of Láadan that are its most transcendent and riveting. Elgin is on shakier ground explaining how this dystopia came about. It’s more than a little hard to swallow women losing all powers of majority by the end of the 20th century!— though these fears offer a historic value from the height of the Reagan era.

Another potential drawback is while Native Tongue's narrative threads end more or less satisfactorily, Elgin leaves the implications of “what next” in the overthrow of the old world order open. The way the novel ends leaves me to presume that this is covered in the two sequels, though judging by the reviews, not in a way that is satisfying to all.

As it is, however, Native Tongue is a powerful and radical message of female empowerment, delivered not only in the intelligent 'science' of linguistics but also compelling 'fiction' that documents the concerns of feminism in the era it was written. Rating: 4.5

Also I learned a ton about linguistics and Láadan is just frequently damn cool:

doroledum: Say you have an average woman. She has no control over her life. She has little or nothing in the way of a resource for being food to herself, even when it is necessary. She has family and animals and friends and associates that depend on her for sustenance of all kinds. She rarely has adequate sleep or rest; she has no time for herself, no space of her own, little or no money to buy things for herself, no opportunity to consider her own emotional needs. She is at the beck and call of others, because she has these responsibilities and obligations and does not choose to (or cannot) abandon them. For such a woman, the one and only thing she is likely to have a little control over for indulging her own self is FOOD. When such a woman overeats, the verb for that is “doreledim”. (And then she feels guilty, because there are women whose children are starving and who do not have even THAT option for self-indulgence.)

[Mary Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Women have no rights and are the property of men. Aliens communicate with humans through the families of the linguist 'Lines', who have a monopoly on learning Alien languages. The women of the Lines, as restricted and patronized as any other women, have developed a secret language for women only. If the men find out, they're doomed. But the Aliens are watching ...

I read this book years ago (it was published in 1984) and I had an immediate visceral reaction: yes, she's right. The male characters patronize, humiliate, and denigrate their women. They treat them as not-very-bright semen receptacles. Any woman who has sat in a meeting with men will recognize the interactions. Elgin created an actual 'women's language' called Laadan which is still active today, and I think, like Tolkien, the language came before the story.

It's interesting that current reviews on amazon refer to the book as dated and several people say it's history and things are not like this today. Well, things may be better, or we at least have the concept they should be better, but this is not dated.

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jul 12, 815am ~~ Review asap.

Jul 15, 1030am ~~ I've been a little busy lately and also wrapped up in book 2 of this trilogy, so I sort of forgot that I had this review pending. Oops.

I'm still a bit pressed for time so I am not going to babble on very long here. I enjoyed the book. I thought it was interesting and complex. I was fascinated by the linguistic aspect and information.

I could rant forever about how so many things mentioned in this book are happening today....just look at the Taliban in Afghanistan, or at the Supreme Court in the United States.

Men and their need to control everything around them. Women and their need to survive, and the choices they must make in order to do so. Will this never end? When will humanity learn to work together? Not just between countries, but between all the sexes as well?

I suppose if that happened we would not have books like this to read, would we.

But I would like to see what such a world could be.

[Kaila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reread, July 27, 2021

I remembered the main premise - women regain their power by creating a language - but could not have told you anything else about the story. Upon rereading, I can see why. The characters are not memorable and there is little world-building. Most of the "character development" is making it very, very clear to the reader that this future sucks for women. Holy shit, WE GET IT. I'm knocking it down to 3 stars.

I understand the premise that everyone hates women, fine. But I never understood why everyone hated the linguists so much. A solid part of the book was people talking about either hating women or hating linguists and it got real boring.

There was a weird time jump that I still can't quite figure out. Michaela comes to live in the Chornyak household when Nazareth is like 16. Then she is still there when Nazareth turns 40 but it does not seem like any time has passed for Michaela at all. Something weird happened there and I either missed it or it was wrong.

Original Review, April 13 2013

Upon buying:

Just look at how amazing that cover is. HOW COULD I SAY NO.

Upon finishing:

The cover had disappointingly little to do with the book. I wanted babies in giant test tubes presided over by gigantic happy aliens, ok?

I am torn as to what I should rate this book. I think it's a 3.5 but I'll round up. Parts of the feminism were so ridiculous that after a while I was like God I get it, women's lives suck in your future! Women are considered minors in this crappy future, and can't hold jobs or buy anything without their husband's say so. I mentioned this to my boyfriend and he shot back "Well women basically weren't citizens until the 1800s. They couldn't acquire much wealth or be landowners, they were basically slaves."

Damn, he's totally right. So this book is basically the shitty Dark Ages but in the future. Lots of alien languages are part of this future, coincidentally, but very few actual aliens.

The thesis put forth is basically - language is empowering. Feminism is empowering. What's more empowering than a language meant just for women?

Edit: OH MY GOD IT'S A TRILOGY. Time to acquire. Oh yes, my pretties.

[Nathan]

I'll never forgive the university professors who made me read this novel. Some of the sci-fi elements in it were interesting and it posed some compelling linguistic questions but mostly it was just tiresome. The majority of the narrative is the kind heavy-handed man-hating that has done more to hurt the cause of feminism than further it. Every man in the novel is a cowardly, misogynistic tyrant while every woman is a long-suffering, angelic saint. I found the whole thing simply tedious.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first bought a copy of this book around the time that my poetry collection A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora placed second in the 2017 Elgin Awards, an annual award bestowed on books of poetry by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). The Elgin Awards are named in honor of author Suzette Haden Elgin, who founded the SFPA in 1978. Although I already knew some things about Elgin at the time, I wanted to learn more about her, and so I made it a project to spend some time over the coming months with her most famous work, the 1984 cult classic novel Native Tongue.

Of all other books, Native Tongue probably gets compared most often to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which came out only one year later, in 1985: both novels imagine a dystopian future in which women have been stripped of their rights and must revert to being treated as chattel by men. Feminist science fiction is not the only subgenre of science fiction Elgin pioneered in Native Tongue, though: Elgin also blazed a trail in how she envisioned the expanded role linguists might play in future civilizations, as the need for humans to communicate effectively with extraterrestrials becomes a reality. It might be argued that without Elgin's Native Tongue, we would not have, say, Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," the linguist-centering 1998 short story that inspired the acclaimed movie Arrival. Elgin's fable of women furtively working together to invent a new language that will bring about their liberation is a tremendous novel of ideas, one that -- like Chiang's story, a decade later -- explores the implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in a dizzyingly original way.

And if you're worried that being heavy on ideas might make Native Tongue dull, you can rest easy. Elgin's characterizations are lively, and the book is stuffed so full of dramatic incident -- murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, nefarious government men doing the creepy things nefarious government men do -- that it actually borders on feeling pulpy. I admit I was initially a bit concerned that this might be a simplistic novel of moral outrage, focused on the obvious conflict between a righteous group "A" and a vicious group "B," but it turns out that Elgin's realistically complex world contains factions within factions: women opposing men, populists of all genders opposing an intellectual elite class, elites slyly jockeying for power with and/or outright backstabbing other elites, alliances and friendships being struck across faction lines, etc., etc. -- no one here is wholly innocent. In this, Native Tongue somewhat reminded me of another recent read I enjoyed more than I first expected to -- William Browning Spencer's Zod Wallop, which similarly blends authorial loftiness of mind with purely pleasurable plottiness.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Excellent story with well drawn characters (both male and female) and an original premise. Recommended!!

[Jenny H · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed it the first time I read it (I've studied Linguistics myself, which made it interesting) and I occasionally enjoy re-reading. But the re-reads expose more and more holes in the plot that get more and more irritating.

How on earth did the US constitution get amended at a time when women still had the vote? And why does a change to the US constitution apparently affect the whole world?

Why do Linguists live so austerely as a public relations measure when they can see for themselves that it doesn't work?

If there's nobody on Earth who can speak Alien Language X, how do the Linguists persuade an alien who speaks it to come and live in their Interface and teach it to a human baby? What does the wretched alien do all day when it's not talking to a baby?

If the languages are being learnt by babies and toddlers, how do they become so proficient in all the vocabulary and cultural nuances that never come up in the conversations of babies and toddlers?

And if Teenager Y is the only person in the universe (apart from a couple of toddlers) who speaks both X and English - where do the dictionaries come from that the second-best backups look things up in?

And how when the men towards the end spotted all the 'charming concepts' the little girls were coming up with, did those men know what the girls were talking about, if the girls were talking in Laadan? If they weren't, why weren't they? Are we supposed to believe the girls were talking about Laadan (which we know they knew was top-secret) in front of their fathers in a language their fathers understood? Why would they use a long-winded English (or whatever) paraphrase for a concept when they'd got a language that expressed it one word?

[Ruxandra Grrr [in a slump :(((((] · Rating 4 out of 5]

My expectations were maybe too huge for this one? I really liked it, but I didn't unabashedly love it and it's hard for me to figure out right now why. So I'll let it simmer for a while, go to book club, talk about it, and try to come back here.

Still, fascinating work for sure and am definitely continuining in the series!

[Mikhaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering how obsessed I am with dystopian science fiction, I can't believe I never read this feminist cult classic until now. It's not as well-written as the Handmaid's Tale, but it's still pretty amazing.

The stuff about language reminds me a lot of 1984 and the Newspeak dictionary--the idea that taking away words for certain concepts or creating/encoding words for others can change the way people think and behave and affect whether they have the capacity to rebel against an authoritarian regime.

The book's biggest flaw is gender essentialism. The women in the book are for the most part unreservedly good and nurturing and sweet. The men are pretty much evil bigoted pigs, although a few are a little more complicated than that. The book seems to advocate creating a women's world and women's language that totally writes off all men as irredeemable. (Although despite that, all the characters in the book also seem to be heterosexual, which is a whole other issue).

That said, it's still a great and fascinating read. Plus one of the heroines of the book is an assassin spy named Michaela, so how could I not love it?

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up Native Tongue while browsing the library and am surprised I’d never heard of it before. It’s one of the SF Masterworks series that I’ve read avidly and has a fascinating conceit. The setting is 23rd century America, where women have the same inferior legal status as children. Humanity has made contact with many alien species and relies upon a small number of secretive families to act as translators. The linguist families raise their children, male and female, to speak many human and alien languages. The narrative loosely follows Nazareth, a highly gifted linguist, through her gruelling career, terrible marriage, and retirement. Once linguist women can no longer have children they move into ‘Barren Houses’, spaces away from men that allow some independence and even resistance. The narrative doesn’t just focus upon Nazareth, though, but also follows others connected with the linguists in various ways.

The social world-building in Native Tongue is effective but, not to put too fine a point on it, grim as fuck. These are the thoughts of Thomas Blair Chornyak, head of the linguists, about a nurse that he’s having an affair with:

They were frail reeds, women, especially in the hands of an experienced man like himself, and a man who was – as he was – a master of the erotic arts. If he’s had any doubts about that mastery, due to his advancing years and Rachel’s dutiful lukewarm attentions, Michaela’s rapt ecstasy at even his most casual efforts would have swiftly dispelled them. She was never in any way indelicate, never demanding, never lustful – lustfulness was abhorrent in a woman, and had she shown any sign of it he would have instantly dispensed with her. […]

An entirely satisfactory woman, this Michaela Landry. As nearly flawless a woman as he had ever encountered. Under the circumstances, he was willing to forgive her inability to resist his advances and live up to his earlier expectations. It is unjust, he reminded himself, to expect of a female more than her own natural characteristics allow her to accomplish.

Michaela is a wonderful character. She isn’t a linguist, so acts as an outsider perspective on them when she joins the household to nurse Thomas’ elderly father. She has perfected the skill of lulling men into a false sense of security then murdering them. Her first husband and Thomas certainly do a lot to earn it. I appreciated her guilt when realising not all linguists are evil, though. Her role in the plot is to be an angel of death with a conscience, in contrast to the government scientists who murdered her baby. The denouement in which Thomas realises what the women of the Barren House are plotting and rants to Michaela about it is brilliantly tense. He thinks she is completely harmless, while she immediately grasps the danger the female linguists are in and kills him to save them.

It’s the linguistic elements that really stand out, as the antifeminist dystopia isn’t as original. One narrative thread follows a group of morally abhorrent government scientists who murder babies in the process of trying to dislodge the linguist families' oligopoly. They are trying these appalling human experiments because attempts at computer automated translation have so far failed. I found Elgin’s angle on this amazingly prescient, given the novel was published in 1984. The quote below is essentially still applicable 38 years later:

The only way there is to acquire a language, which means that you know it so well you never have to be conscious of the knowledge, is to be exposed to that language while you are still very young – the younger the better. The infant human being has the most perfect language-learning mechanism on Earth, and no-one has ever been able to replicate that mechanism or even to analyse it very well. We know that it involves scanning for patterns and storing those that are found, but that’s something we can build a computer to do. But we’ve never been able to build a computer that can acquire a language. In fact, we’ve never even been able to build a computer that can learn a language in the imperfect way that a human adult can learn one.

We can now automate translation via machine learning, but the computer certainly doesn’t understand the language. Would machine translation be trustworthy for vital international treaty negotiations? I don’t think so; it’s just replicating patterns ‘learned’ by crunching vast amounts of data created by humans. Native Tongue examines the ways that languages can be oppressive but also liberatory. During their minimal spare time, the linguist women work on an experimental language that would allow them some freedom. Thus a generally depressing plot ends on rather a hopeful note, which made me keen to read the other two books in the trilogy. Although Native Tongue is hard to read in places due to relentless oppression of women and cruelty to babies, it is rewarding and interesting in its treatment of linguistics.

[Repellent Boy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5. La historia de Lengua materna nos presenta un mundo futurista en el que la mujer ha perdido todo derecho. Las mujeres están sometidas completamente a los caprichos del hombre y son poco más que objetos para el uso y disfrute de éstos. Todo este entorno opresor convivirá con una sociedad ubicada aproximádamente en el 2200, con grandes avances tecnológicos. Lo primero que choca, indudablemente de la novela es eso. Normalemente el progreso suele ir acompañado de más progreso. Conocer un mundo tan avanzado en inteligencia, y tan atrasado en derechos, asuta. Y da mucho que pensar. ¿Qué pasaría si el hombre llegara a tener un poder y una conciencia tan avanzada? ¿Lo usaría para el bien común? ¿O seguría buscando el privilegio propio?

Las historia ira sucediendo a lo largo de varias décadas y se nos irán presentando diferentes personajes. En este mundo se distiguirán dos tipos de humanos. Los lingos y los "normales". Los lingos no son otra cosas que lingüistas. Personas terriblemente inteligentes y dotadas de un gran talento para adquirir idiomas. Tantos humanos como alienígenas. Bajo toda esta trama, las mujeres encontrar una manera de luchar. La única arma que tienen a mano. La creación de un nuevo idioma. Un idioma creado por mujeres para mujeres.

El libro me ha gustado mucho. Los personajes feméninos son increíbles. Sobre todo los personjaes de Michaela y Nazareth. Los masculinos era asquerosamente desagradables, por igual jajaja. La pega que le pongo es que, quizás, al tratarse de una trilogía, se me ha quedado como que quedá demasiado abierto. Ahora tendré que leer las otras partes. Y las sagas no son lo mío.

En difnitiva. Un buen libro feminisita. Representa demasiado bien la sociedad en la que podríamos acabar si no se lucha. Buscaré pronto la segunda parte. Merece más fama de la que tiene.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

First let me say that the "concept" of this book is definitely 5 stars. The idea that a language can influence culture and behavior, and ultimately the outcome of history is really brilliant. However, the author fails to take this brilliant idea beyond the concept. The plot drags, the storytelling is boring, the characterizations are flat, and the flow is cumbersome.

There are so many flaws in this story. The characters are terribly two -dimensional, almost to the point of being inhuman. For example, the women are asexual and the men are cave-mannish. The author doesn't give any single character any type of profound thoughts that would add to the character development. You can sum up the male thought processes in four words: "Man smart. Woman dumb." You can sum up the women's thought processes in five words: "Male species=Rapist baby-killers. There is no back story that explains or, more importantly, supports the reasons behind the supposed change in the constitution. Many of the chapter openings are just trite. The story drags horrendously. There are chapters where the author can't decide if she is writing a murder mystery, complete with a femme fatale, or if she is writing a thriller with evil basement Pentagon scientists. Most of the time the dialogue is just confusing or seemingly incomplete. All-in-all, I would strongly recommend that any teacher looking to assign feminist sci-fi literature consider something other than Native Tongue; Grass by Sheri Tepper or The Handmaid's Tale are much better choices.

[Joe Schmutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fiction is one of the more masterful pieces of literature of the 20th century. It should be considered for inclusion in reading lists for English majors. Don't let that terrorize you. The book is engrossing; the plot is multilayered; the concept is unique; and the characters are easy to understand.

On the surface it's about learning to communicate with life forms so alien, it requires human children to interact with aliens during the child's language forming years. A secondary plot line deals with the continued struggle between man and woman. Underlying all that is a theme dealing with freedom of speech.

This book has me scrabbling for every novel Ms. Elgin brings out.

[Mir]

[Update Feb 2015: SHE has passed away. http://catherineldf.livejournal.com/2...]

I've been seeing the sequel to this book in my public library (a ratty paperback) since I was a kid, and wanted to read it, but have never found the first volume.

[Francesc Cortès Cid · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,6/5
Una de les novel·les cabdals de la ciencia-ficció feminista. Hauria de ser més coneguda i llegida.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

When your novel starts with a board meeting, you know you're in for a real thrill ride. I feel like this was written by an author with good ideas and solid linguistic knowledge, but no real feel for writing fiction. The multiple plots meshed together awkwardly. The characters were mostly one-dimensional, particularly the male linguists. Almost everything was told, not shown.

Does this have value, as the essay in my edition* claims, as a feminist document? I don't know. In 1984 when this was published, I was too busy being the biggest feminist in my fourth-grade class to really relate to what the author is talking about. I think it's highly problematic that all the men are evil and most are stupid. One of the back cover blurbs says that this novel will "inspire those who believe that women's words can change the world." OK, but that wasn't really anything I ever doubted. Of course, the 1980s were a foul decade, and maybe people needed more reassurance back then.

*By the way, this edition had so many typos in it, you would not believe it.

[alienticia]

"zhaláad: o ato de abrir mão de uma ilusão ou percepção querida/reconfortante/familiar"
!!!!!!!caramba!!!!!
me fez querer voltar pras minhas aulas de introdução à linguística, talvez porque eu me senti do mesmo jeito que quando assisti a chegada (2016) quando era apenas uma caloura de letras. realmente impressionante todos os conceitos que a suzette haden elgin testa nesse livro, não só os de aquisição da linguagem e relativismo linguístico. muita coisa também é uma cápsula do tempo pro feminismo dos anos 70, especialmente se a gente pensar nas casas estéreis como círculos de tomada de consciência.
e tem a história também. apesar de ficar meio confusa com a temporalidade achei tudo muito cativante, especialmente os enredos da michaela e dos agentes do governo. gostei muito de descobrir aos pouquinhos a história e o funcionamento do mundo, também. o artigo no posfácio do final também é interessantíssimo. enfim, não calei a boca sobre esse livro enquanto tava lendo, e agora não vou falar a boca sobre ele pra todo mundo que eu conheço

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the afterword:
“Central to this trilogy, as to most of the science fiction of Suzette Haden Elgin, are two interrelated convictions: ‘The first hypothesis is that language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change; the second is that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be.’”

This book is everything I want and I can’t wait to read the rest of the trilogy, and then read it over and over again.

[El Biblionauta]

Si hagués de triar un sol motiu pel qual la ficció especulativa m’agrada molt més que no pas la realista/mimètica, diria que és perquè en la primera les autores es permeten plantejar plans paral·lels al nostre per tal d’assajar hipòtesis sobre la realitat que habitem. En aquest sentit, Llengua Materna, de Suzette Haden Elgin s’emmarca dins la tradició feminista que la fa servir per investigar qüestions de gènere, amb experiments literaris tan diferents com els de les ficcions de Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, Han Kang, Johanna Sinisalo, Mōto Hagio, Emily Carroll, Emma Ríos o Caitlín R. Kiernan. I, està clar, Margaret Atwood amb el seu El conte de la serventa, novel·la amb la qual hem trobat sovint comparada Llengua Materna. Estimada lectora, crec que cal trencar aquest símil amb urgència.

Podeu valorar el llibre i llegir completa la ressenya deTatian Dunyó a: https://elbiblionauta.com/ca/2020/04/...

[d · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing book about female solidarity and language. i hate describing things as combinations of other things but this is kind of like the handmaids tale with aliens. highly recommend.

[Eve · Rating 1 out of 5]

The entire time I was reading Native Tongue I was in disbelief. I kept waiting for the punchline to land, for the confirmation that this was a bad (as in unfunny) satire of how so many "feminist" science fiction novels are ridiculous, badly written, and often just straight up misogynistic, but nope, this is supposed to be the real deal. It was recommended to me by someone who's book opinions I used to trust, so I guess she's anathema now.

I was so excited to read a novel where women invent their own language, as, since it was written by a linguist who actually created said language and wanted women to use it IRL, naturally I expected it to be in-cooperated into the book in interesting ways. Which it was not. At all.

I also assumed that, since women had to invent a whole new language in order to liberate themselves from this dystopian future, they'd be in some kind of 1984 situation where language was being systematically destroyed by the Powers That Be and women weren't able to talk about themselves as a class anymore (which is actually more akin to how out grimdark future is actually working out). Nope - turns out that in 2300 or whenever this is set, Americans still speak the same type of English as they did in the 1980s, except in a far more irritating manner (not that this is intentional, Elgin just can't write dialogue). On top of that, every human language and then some still exists, and these women also have access to alien languages, and yet they still need to invent their own language to express Super Special Female concepts that men (and aliens, I guess) simply cannot comprehend, like... uhhhh... when something is "revoltingly bland".

Elgin promotes what I find to be the *ahem* revoltingly misogynistic idea that languages are Man Made and women somehow didn't share in their creation and don't have them as our Native Tongues. Kind of ironic since her feminist language has a special word for the erasure of women's achievements in history. Anyway, turns out the magic woman language is unnecessary anyway because all women have to do to free themselves of the nuances of patriarchy is act like perfect automatons (which the women in this novel all pretty much are anyway) and, hey presto, men will get bored of women and collectively vote to send them away! Mission accomplished!

Now for Elgin's automatons: The women in this novel do not at all feel like they were raised in the supposedly horrible culture it's set in (I say "supposedly" because we see so little of it). Every one of them is born a fully-formed 1980s asexual, genius separatist feminist ready to fight The Man using the innate female powers of feminine wiles and emotional manipulation, while every male character is a complete moron and usually a sociopathic monster to boot. How men even rule the world with the one braincell they share between them is the greatest mystery in this book. I'm no fan of The Handmaid's Tale, but at least Atwood understands that patriarchal societies require the complicity of large groups of women, and on men and women having interpersonal bonds etc. whereas Elgin cannot ever grasp the basic fact that people are PEOPLE... Which is maybe why the alien "characters" are essentially just language robots. Seriously, the sci-fi aspects of this novel are beyond appalling. Every alien species in the universe is happy to just be locked up in isolation talking to a human infant for years on end, apparently. And somehow ten-year-olds are masterful, native speaking diplomats for alien races because of this experience? Sureeee.

My favourite character - mostly out of spite since I think we're supposed to hate him the most - is Thomas, who's the closest we get to a main antagonist. You can tell that Elgin resents having to write a male character who has even a modicum of intelligence, since she takes every opportunity to remind us that whist Thomas is smart compared to other men, he's still STUPID and EVIL and SEVERELY UNDERESTIMATES THE SUPREME POWER OF WAHMAN and is also willing to go out of character at a moment's notice to splurge Man Secrets to some woman because she's worked her feminine charms on him. Thomas may be a master manipulator, but he just cannot compete with the innately manipulative, scheming nature of women that both Suzette Haden Elgin and incel forums endorse!

It's very amusing to me that Elgin was apparently bitter over her language not catching on and that the later novels in this trilogy ramped up the bitterness and badness to the point where even many fans of the first don't like them.

I feel like I could go on forever but this is already a mess, so I'll leave off with this quote from my main man Thomas, which I relate to on a spiritual level: "Darling! [...] I am not your darling . . . or anyone’s. As you know perfectly well. I am a cruel and vindictive and heartless monster who cares for nothing but his own selfish and twisted goals.”

[Megan Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a damn shame this feminist science fiction cult classic trilogy is out of print today. Elgin was a linguist, and this novel explores a world where women’s rights have been revoked, but the birth of a women’s language may change everything. Also ALIENS! Native Tongue is not a subtle book but it is a fascinating one, narratively, historically (2nd Wave feminism, Moral Majority), and in how it interacts with linguistic theory. I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

[Uvrón · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterpiece on communication under patriarchy. The science fiction dystopia setting arranges the characters into a position to best explore this topic: women are legal minors under the protection of White American Christian husbands and fathers, valued and therefore controlled as breeders and workers while men invent rhetoric to give themselves the credit and law to give themselves the income. In other words, existing misogynist ideology has been codified, the language that constructs it now law and scripture. There is no high-tech method of control here; the patriarchy’s greatest weapon is words.

The book has the blind spots typical of White second-wave feminism; all characters fit neatly within a gender binary, and we can assume everyone in this elite US society is White. Suzette Haden Elgin herself had chronic health problems, and so there is a focus on patriarchal medical institutions, illness, and aging—the heinous treatment of the old/ill/aberrant/unsexy woman, coupled with the freedom of escape from male attention. But we don’t see much of the experience of disabled women who are still forced to participate in patriarchal work and family. Elgin’s whole hypothesis is that our language places limits on our understanding and action, and the whole movement she was part of demonstrates this, exploring and dissecting patriarchy but struggling with intersectionality, a word not coined until 1989, five years after this book’s publication.

But within those limitations, this book is unparalleled in its depiction of patriarchal thought as both subtle and brutal, the wriggling serpent that evades almost any confrontation, and when finally cornered strikes lethally rather than listening. Patriarchy cripples men’s capacity for understanding and empathy, because it gives them such incentives to remain in the status quo. We spend a lot of time in the thoughts of the book’s villains, an approach I normally don’t enjoy, but here it serves to unpack the insanity of patriarchal logic. Kindnesses bestowed on women are motivated by ego, out of concern for what other men might think or a pleasure in seeing himself in a benevolent patriarchal role. When a man is forced to admit to himself he’s wrong, he immediately processes this through toddler-like vindictive resentment, his own power preventing any enlightenment. Subjugated women, on the other hand, are forced to confront reality, understand male thought, and work within patriarchy tactically and strategically in order to survive individually and resist en masse.

The book repeatedly discusses the abuse of wives and mistresses as private listening devices, safe confidants because an inferior can't hurt your ego. Men even admit to themselves that they need women to resist: “It used to be that a man could do something he was ashamed of, too, and then go home and talk to his women about it and be able to count on them to nag him and harangue him and carry on hysterically at him until he felt he’d paid in full for what he’d done. And then a man could count on the women to go right on past that point with their nonsense until he actually felt he’d been justified in what he’d done.” Any man who only opens up to his wife or girlfriend should read this, and any woman who thinks she’s helping him grow by listening.

There is a lot more to write about. The despised Linguist society that is hated for its skill and its wealth, but which thrives by being an invaluable tool for the imperialists and capitalists (Elgin was a linguist herself, and clearly had a complicated relationship with that field). The “womanlike” experiences of babies and children, another class of person who experiences the brute force of societal and government power despite moral rhetoric about its protection. Whether a woman’s language could change our experiences; in other words, how far does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis go? (Many people have picked up the factoid that “Sapir-Whorf is disproven” but set that aside and there is a lot to explore in that blurry boundary between “weak” and “strong” Sapir-Whorf.) The extension of that topic even further, into whether we could ever understand the Umwelt of a whale or an alien built on a totally different language or biology.

Dystopias have a complicated political role, since the magnification of the worst parts of our society risks trapping us in despair rather than imagination of alternatives. Many second-wave feminists reacted to the new clarity on patriarchy’s brutality by defining woman as the suffering gender, decrying women who found joy in feminine roles or excluding women who discarded those roles rather than reclaiming and redefining them. Native Tongue, despite its blind spots, avoids these dead ends by constructing both the exposé and the blueprint. It shows us the brutality of patriarchy, but also tells us that we women have the advantage in linguistic, social, and emotional understanding, and if we use those tools in solidarity, we will not be trapped forever.

[Ignacio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Novela sobre la dominación de las mujeres en una sociedad futura en la que son explotadas como recurso para comunicarse con alienígenas. Por un lado, ejercen de traductoras en sus contactos y, por otro, son tratadas como ganado de crianza para las nuevas generaciones destinadas a ejercer ese rol. Suzette Haden Elgin sigue sobre todo a una mujer que pasa por los diferentes estadios de su género en esta sociedad, pero va más allá de ella para ofrecer una mayor amplitud. Así enhebra un encadenamiento de secuencias variada que, con su entrecruzamiento y el ritmillo, se sobrepone a cuestiones de composición de mundo bastante risibles (ordenadores incapaces de servir como traductores; la falta de supervisión sobre un recurso tan valioso; maniqueísmo en la composición de la mayoría de personajes...) y una cierta liviandad a pesar de la truculencia de los hechos narrados.