I picked up [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] 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 [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] 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. [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] 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 [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] 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. ( )

Minu jaoks mitmel moel väga raputav raamat, ja just eriti pärast Kuangi "Babeli" lugemist, kuna temaatika on sama, aga hoopis teise nurga alt. Keele väest, maagiast ja sellest, kuidas keel loob maailma, milles me elame. ( )

This is my all-time go-to feminist sc-fi read ( )

This is a feminist dystopia written in the 1980s, set in a future in which women's rights have been taken away and they are completely subservient to men. In this future, linguists are very important as they communicate with the many, many alien species that have been encountered to negotiating trading contracts and space colonies. The main events of the story take place 200 years in the future and follow the household of one of the 13 linguist families, whose children are trained from birth to acquire alien languages.

I had such mixed feelings about this book. For one thing, it took me so long to get into it, for two reasons. First, I didn't think it was plausible that all of women's rights would be taken away in the 1990s by constitutional amendments just because one paper was published positing that women were biologically not as intelligent as men. As someone who was alive in the 1990s, this just does not seem feasible. I can't imagine that even if 38 states had ratified these amendments, that our country would have remained whole after that.

Second, everyone talks like someone in a parody of a stiff 1950s television show. Sometimes, it was laughable. And the men are so ridiculous. I kept getting angry every time I picked this up to read and had to take breaks. Granted, there certainly are men who think this way about women, but in this book, it's ALL of them. And there is no romantic love, or even lust. Really? I get tired of misogyny too, but this goes against everything I know and have experienced of male-female relationships.

But I started getting more into it as I read. The baby-exploding caught my attention. That was a bit of horror I wasn't expecting. Too bad that plot line wasn't developed much more, but I gather that was probably left for the sequels. Then the character of Michaela, the one woman who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. I really liked her and all the bits of the book she was in. This story required an outsider character to give it some perspective, and she was it.

Overall, the writing was stiff and awkward and aggressively feminist, of its day. It did remind me a lot of The Female Man, in that sense. But it has interesting ideas to present in the guise of science fiction. Overall, I'm glad I read this, if not for the plot or characterization, but rather for the ideas and for it being a kind of artifact of a very particular time in the feminist movement (again, like The Female Man). ( )

Kind of interesting but I got to a point where I couldn't be bothered to finish it. ( )

Too Many Unanswered Questions.

I read Elgin's Native Tongue because it was touted as on par with Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale. While it treats similar topics, it is not as good as either of those classics.

A major flaw for me is that the book's main premises are unexplained. First, the novel begins with excerpts from (fictional) constitutional amendments which repeal women's right to vote, and transform them into legal minors. While a similar premise is carefully and plausibly explained in The Handmaid's Tale, here in Native Tongue, the whole legal maneuver rests on one scientific paper which is never explained or even alluded to again. Why did this paper, which claimed to prove that women are the intellectual inferiors of men, carry so much weight? What was the proof? Were there protests? We'll never know.

Secondly, the plot revolves around the linguistic Households, or Lines, thirteen families which have cornered a monopoly on translation, crucial to Earth's rapid exploration and colonization of the galaxy. The Linguists claim to possess a genetic difference that justifies their monopoly; the government suspects that's a fabrication. We never find out if either option is true.

Elgin is also skeptical of "test tube" babies. Hers are not quite human, while we know now that babies conceived in vitro are indistinguishable from the more traditional kind. However, one must keep in mind that her "tubies" are more like Huxley's, spending the entire gestation in vitro and "decanted" instead of born, something we have (fortunately) not yet attempted.

Finally, the book ends with the separation of men and women, physically and linguistically. Is this the solution Elgin advocates? If so, it is an incredibly cynical one. It is true that in a world where men and women play segregated roles, they can't "speak each other's language," but if they are able to interact in a more egalitarian fashion, they should grow in understanding. "Separate but equal" was debunked decades before Elgin penned this tome, and I am surprised and disappointed to see her wind up at that lame conclusion.


( )

I seriously tried with this. Again and again. There were some great parts but overall it felt like a requirement, a slog, not a pleasure. ( )

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin is a highly recommended classic dystopian novel which was originally published in 1984 and is currently being re-released. This is the first book in a three book series.

In 2205 the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed. Men hold absolute power. Women are treated as children who must always be supervised by men and any of their actions require male approval. The only value women hold is to provide children. The current world-wide economy depends upon trade with other cultures, including alien. The Chornyak family is a powerful family of translators who raise their children, daughters included, to be linguists. All their members speak multiple languages and are used as translators in sensitive negotiations.

Nazareth Adiness is a brilliant linguist and the most talented of the Chornyak family. As with all translators she has been working since she was young and is a valuable asset to the family, yet she still has to endure an arranged marriage as a teen and the expectation that she will have a large number of children (while still working). Once women are past child bearing years or deemed infertile, they are moved to Barren House, to keep the older women from causing any drama in the main house.

Unknown to any man is that the useless older women of Barren house have been working together to make up a secret language of their own, a language that will only be taught to women and one they can use to communicate with each other without the men's interference. The women are preparing for a coming revolution where they will remove themselves from the control of men.

It's rather surprising to me that I never came across Native Tongue before this reissued edition. The world building depicts a misogynistic society in a realistic manner. We currently have cultures/societies where women have no rights and men are in control. It is an interesting concept, but certainly Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is over all a better novel with more depth and clarity of characters. The society is too divided here, too bad versus good, with men versus women, and all men bad. It is interesting, certainly the discussion of languages was interesting, but it also was a bit too simplistic.

First, I was engrossed in the narrative and found the whole concept fascinating, but I can't say it was especially well written as a novel. The character development is superficial. Perhaps the main issue I had was the implausibility that the Nineteenth Amendment would ever be repealed and all women would just submit. Even today there are women who fight back against certain societies that have patriarchal cultural expectations to control women. Not all women will submit; there will always be some women who will fight for their freedom and rights. I'm highly recommending it for some of the science fiction concepts presented.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of The Feminist Press at CUNY.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2019/07/native-tongue.html ( )

An interesting set up, but her agenda got in the way of what could have been a good story ( )

Suzette Haden Elgin published Native Tongue, the first book in this eponymous trilogy, in 1984. I was 22 in 1984.

I remember Reagan’s election and how many of us on the left (I was already quite at home way over on the left wing) were frightened by the possibilities, many of which have come to pass. I also remember the beginnings of the backlash on feminism, a backlash that just keeps growing 30 years later. So, I get where Haden’s coming from with her story of a dystopian future USA where women have lost all their rights and are now the property of men in worse ways then they were before the second wave of feminism. My 22 year-old self would have eaten this book up and looked for more.

I’m sad to report, however, that the book didn’t really do much for my 51 year-old self. The story immediately irked me with the premise that the constitutional amendments revoking the 19th amendment and turning women into minors under the law would have happened by 1991. I mean, okay, Reagan and his ilk scared me, too, but 1991? That seems awfully premature.

That’s always a risk writers take, putting events in the super-near future. I’m still miffed that 2001 came and it was nothing like the movie. There was a 33-year gap there. To predict something this cataclysmic happening less than 10 years from when you’re publishing? Might have wanted to think that through a little more.

So, I had to try to push that aside as I read further. Fortunately the rest of the book takes place centuries in the future, the 22nd to be exact. There we discover that not only do women still not have any rights, but society has been divided up into two antagonistic groups: the Linguists and everyone else. The Linguists are the only people capable of communicating with all the alien societies humans have met, so they’re necessary as translators to make all the treaties and do all the negotiating. Regular people hate them, so the Linguist families (the Lines) live in large communal houses buried in the earth away from prying eyes and violent reaction.

One of the reasons that regular folk hate the Linguists is that Linguist women are allowed to work outside the home as translators because, apparently, there’s so much translating that needs to be done, they have to. Then we have all the stuff happening with babies blowing up because they can’t fathom non-humanoid alien languages (no, really). I haven’t even gotten to the Linguist women’s work on creating a language that allows women to express their thoughts better than standard English, French, German, whatever. This, one might argue, is really the point of the book, but it gets lost, to me, amidst all the other stuff.

Oh, and there’s a serial killer. (Who’s actually my favorite part of the novel; her first murder? That chapter would make a great Tales from the Crypt of something.)

I hate to say this, because Elgin’s short story “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me” remains one of my favorite short stories (Top 10, no question. It’s awesome. And hard to find. I have it in Dick Allen’s Science Fiction: The Future (1983 edition).), but I found Native Tongue to be too bloated and ponderous, too preachy and heavyhanded. While not all the women are saints, by any means (see: serial killer), most of them are and there isn’t one kind man in the whole thing. They’re all stupid, misogynistic assholes, every one of them, which is just bullshit. Even in 1984, I had allies. Still do.

None of the characters are really developed at all; they’re all just game pieces for Elgin’s philosophical/linguistic chess board. And there are so many plot holes. What do the aliens in the Interface do all day when they’re not communicating with (and occasionally destroying) the babies? And what happened to all the kids who’d been fed hallucinogens in an attempt to keep them from blowing up after they were taken to the orphanage? The list goes on.

Things I liked? The serial killer character, as I said. She’s really the only person whose character evolved (however slightly) over the course of the novel. I also enjoyed Elgin’s discussions of language and the linguistic “tricks” that one male linguist in particular would use to win arguments. Those were interesting. And I liked the notion that an academic field such as linguistics would become so powerful. But the negative outweighs the positive for me.

Biggest disappointment? The cover of the edition I read. Nothing like that image happens in the book. I wanted my motherly alien! (2.625/5) ( )

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.
( )

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/106328141) 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/1435429567 ( )

I feel about this dystopia about like I feel about The Handmaid's Tale - it seems at once entirely too extreme to be plausible and entirely too plausible to be comfortable. I kept feeling like it was getting excessive and then remembering men who've been exactly like that. But! The linguistics, which was what I was reading it for, were absolutely delightful. I enjoyed it very much, but although there are sequels I doubt I'll bother. ( )

The year is 2179, the war between the sexes is over and the men have 'won'. Women the world over are second-class citizens, without any power or independence. Even the best educated are totally subservient to men, only able to work if a husband or father permits. Our way into the world is through the Chornyak family, one of the 13 'Lines' of linguists. Mankind has reached the stars, and they are full of aliens. Linguists are a despised yet essential part of the global space-trading economy, gifted families whose infant children learn alien languages in a semi-naturalistic way, aided by a mental Interface, and so speak them as native tongues.

A compelling and fascinating read, Native Tongue reads like a forgotten classic, and is certainly a classic of feminist SF. Sometimes the polemic grabs you by the collar with one hand and punches you in the face with the other, the politics is brutal, the relationships between men and women barely functional. The world is prosperous but it is an emotional dystopia. The men may be in charge but they are trapped in their own world-views as much as the women. Everybody suffers and everyone is brutalised, the women more so, as they are the underclass, a near slave-cast, at least in how they are regarded as thinking beings - flawed and of low capacity.

The main fault is the lack of individuality. All the men buy into the patriarchal misogynistic culture without question and without fail. All the women are, if not persecuted angels, at least hold the moral and empathic high-ground, universally kind and sympathetic. Not once do individual men or women question or even introspect on the nature of their society or the roles they inhabit. Some want to get out, some want to smash it down, but in terms of individual relationships between the men and women there is no lasting kindness and an absence of affection and in these terms there is not one rebel.

If this all sounds a bit black and white it's not. The relationships between the sexes are nuanced, and there are clever insights into the hard lives of the linguist families through the eyes of an unusual serial killer outsider.

Native Tongue is an intriguing book about language, oppression, and self-oppression and delusion, written by a linguist. If you are interested in quality SF this is an essential read. And if you are not, then just read it as a very good and distinctive book.
~ ( )

Suzette Haden Elgin published Native Tongue, the first book in this eponymous trilogy, in 1984. I was 22 in 1984.

I remember Reagan’s election and how many of us on the left (I was already quite at home way over on the left wing) were frightened by the possibilities, many of which have come to pass. I also remember the beginnings of the backlash on feminism, a backlash that just keeps growing 30 years later. So, I get where Haden’s coming from with her story of a dystopian future USA where women have lost all their rights and are now the property of men in worse ways then they were before the second wave of feminism. My 22 year-old self would have eaten this book up and looked for more.

I’m sad to report, however, that the book didn’t really do much for my 51 year-old self. The story immediately irked me with the premise that the constitutional amendments revoking the 19th amendment and turning women into minors under the law would have happened by 1991. I mean, okay, Reagan and his ilk scared me, too, but 1991? That seems awfully premature.

That’s always a risk writers take, putting events in the super-near future. I’m still miffed that 2001 came and it was nothing like the movie. There was a 33-year gap there. To predict something this cataclysmic happening less than 10 years from when you’re publishing? Might have wanted to think that through a little more.

So, I had to try to push that aside as I read further. Fortunately the rest of the book takes place centuries in the future, the 22nd to be exact. There we discover that not only do women still not have any rights, but society has been divided up into two antagonistic groups: the Linguists and everyone else. The Linguists are the only people capable of communicating with all the alien societies humans have met, so they’re necessary as translators to make all the treaties and do all the negotiating. Regular people hate them, so the Linguist families (the Lines) live in large communal houses buried in the earth away from prying eyes and violent reaction.

One of the reasons that regular folk hate the Linguists is that Linguist women are allowed to work outside the home as translators because, apparently, there’s so much translating that needs to be done, they have to. Then we have all the stuff happening with babies blowing up because they can’t fathom non-humanoid alien languages (no, really). I haven’t even gotten to the Linguist women’s work on creating a language that allows women to express their thoughts better than standard English, French, German, whatever. This, one might argue, is really the point of the book, but it gets lost, to me, amidst all the other stuff.

Oh, and there’s a serial killer. (Who’s actually my favorite part of the novel; her first murder? That chapter would make a great Tales from the Crypt of something.)

I hate to say this, because Elgin’s short story “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me” remains one of my favorite short stories (Top 10, no question. It’s awesome. And hard to find. I have it in Dick Allen’s Science Fiction: The Future (1983 edition).), but I found Native Tongue to be too bloated and ponderous, too preachy and heavyhanded. While not all the women are saints, by any means (see: serial killer), most of them are and there isn’t one kind man in the whole thing. They’re all stupid, misogynistic assholes, every one of them, which is just bullshit. Even in 1984, I had allies. Still do.

None of the characters are really developed at all; they’re all just game pieces for Elgin’s philosophical/linguistic chess board. And there are so many plot holes. What do the aliens in the Interface do all day when they’re not communicating with (and occasionally destroying) the babies? And what happened to all the kids who’d been fed hallucinogens in an attempt to keep them from blowing up after they were taken to the orphanage? The list goes on.

Things I liked? The serial killer character, as I said. She’s really the only person whose character evolved (however slightly) over the course of the novel. I also enjoyed Elgin’s discussions of language and the linguistic “tricks” that one male linguist in particular would use to win arguments. Those were interesting. And I liked the notion that an academic field such as linguistics would become so powerful. But the negative outweighs the positive for me.

Biggest disappointment? The cover of the edition I read. Nothing like that image happens in the book. I wanted my motherly alien! (2.625/5) ( )

Loved this - very happy to learn (after years of seeing this in bookshops and not getting round to picking it up) that it is in fact the first of a trilogy of feminist sf. And classic feminist sf it is too - classic sf, for that matter, with a very different society from ours clearly and intriguingly delineated in convincing detail.

I say very different society, but in fact it's a dystopia clearly originating from twentieth-century feminist concerns - like [book: The Handmaid's Tale], the cold war between men and women has been definitively lost by the women and a religious patriarchy has grown up in the place of the mocked past society in which women could even be Supreme Court Justices. (A representative quote from one of the chapter headers illustrating the views of that society: "Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a charming woman's eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20th century men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies.")

It's more extreme than [book: The Handmaid's Tale] and more distant in time from our world, but no less absorbing for that; plus it has aliens and linguistics and ties them together in a way that gives us the best of speculative fiction: a view of what could happen if things were different in just this or that sort of way. Where Atwood writes good feminist dystopian fiction with some trappings of sf, Elgin has written good feminist sf, and indeed some of the best of that kind I've read before. ( )

Fascinating so far. ( )

Reviewed on SF Mistressworks: http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/native-tongue-suzette-haden-elgi... ( )

To make something “appear is called magic, is it not? Well…. when you look at another person, what do you see? … Now 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. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them … 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. From now on. And I have made the athad appear… now it exists… Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers… magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.

Native Tongue is spectacular ‘idea’ science-fiction. It’s about feminism and aliens and human expansion, but most of all it’s about 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. Now two centuries in the future, women are treated as “minors” in the eyes of the law… lesser-intelligent beings maintained under the guardianship of men only for their labor and reproductive abilities. Humans have expanded through the galaxy, largely facilitated through the work of “Lingoes”, fifteen Earth-bound linguist families (called “Lines”) who have specialized and monopolized the business of Alien-Human translation and diplomacy.

The women in the Lines are as repressed as those outside—perhaps even more so… being forced to bear as many children as possible to increase the number of languages known to the Lines, to do the bulk of training and raising of these children, while maintaining an equally staggering translation workload to the men and managing the domestic duties that arise from living in the large extended-family bunkers… under the strict patriarchal order of the Lines. But the women of the Barren House in each line are working on a secret project that may unseat all that: the creation of a new human language— Láadan, a language for women by women that they hope to one day make a native tongue that will unite all the women of the galaxy.

Why? Elgin holds a Ph.D in linguistics (and it shows), and in 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 tha 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. It’s this idea that is the glue that holds together Native Tongue’s story numerous disparate narratives and plots (human expansion driven by resource scarcity, unethical government experiments, the limits of human perception and language acquisition; main characters Nazareth Chornyak, a young woman of the Lines whose been spotted the have great potential, and Michaela Landry, a regular woman outside whose trained demeanor masks her mission of revenge against those who killed her young son).

And it is the parts of Native Tongue that are most concerned with the creation of Láadan (and the mystic passages that mythologize its creation, one such quoted at the beginning of this review) that are its most transcendent and riveting. It’s the parts that seek to explain how this extreme feminist dystopia came about that are its least interesting and read as its most dated aspect. It’s more than hard to swallow the Nineteeth Amendment being repealed and women losing all powers of majority in 1991, even from the height of the Reagan era!—though these fears do have a historical interest.

Another point off is that although Elgin leaves the end of the novel fairly satisfactorily narrative-wise* if open-ended, she leaves the implications of “what next” in the overthrow of the old world order incomplete (it’s only the opening trick, we want to see the show!). The way the novel ends leaves me to presume that this is covered in the two sequels, though I’ve heard not-so-nice things about their ability to do so.

*Except for the thread about the government’s attempts at cracking the perception barrier between humans and non-humanoid aliens, which just… ends with a “see ya next time”.

As it is, however, Native Tongue is a powerful and radical message of female empowerment, delivered not only as the intelligent “science” of linguistics but also in the compelling “fiction” as a document on the concerns of feminism in the era it was written.

Also I learned a ton about linguistics and Láadan is just frequently damn cool (and potentially useful):

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.) ( )

I admit I came to this book for the linguistics, this being a particular interest of mine. I also like science fiction, so the combination seemed attractive. I felt the characterization of the men was a bit heavy-handed; really they were just one-dimensional villains, for the most part. But there were some fascinating ideas to be found, and I will give the second book in the trilogy a read as well. ( )

The majority (and important part) of this book takes place about 200 years from now. The world has changed dramatically. Aliens are our trading partners and women have been relegated to the role of perpetual child. All their rights have been removed and they are allowed to do nothing without permission from their male relatives. The Linguists, a group of families that devote their time to the aquisition of new alien languages, are the prime focus of the book, and we learn many fascinating things about the theories behind linguistics throughout.

The group read had so much to say that I find it hard to rate this book. While the characters were for the most part flat and unchanging, I feel that they were written that way for some purpose. There is not a single male character that pulls the sympathy of the reader even a little, and even the females tend to lack the spark to draw the reader to them too closely. There are two notable exeptions to this in Nazareth and Michaela. These two women jumped off the pages for me and held everyone else's place in the story together.

The women of the Linguist families are revolting in quite an odd way. They are creating their own language, a language only for women. Much of the story revolves around the older women of the family collecting the words of the new language together and trying to hide its existence from the men. The big question I came away with was whether or not a language really could change the way of life for the women, or if it was just some way of passing on hope from one generation to the next.

I have added the next book in the series to my wish list, but it may be a little while before I can sit down to read it.

3.5/5 ( )

It is the 23rd Century. The equal rights and independence that women have fought for are now quaint history, and society is run by men. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the Linguist society. The Linguists "control" language, and they are responsible for learning and then acting as interpreters for negotiations between Earth societies and Alien societies. The women have been secretly creating their own language, and when they begin teaching it, society begins to change.

Of course it is science fiction, but I still found it difficult to accept that such a drastic change would come about in such a short time. I found the men as written to be almost caricatures. And it seemed to me that once the background was set up, the denouement came much too quickly, and didn't really ring true.

I'm glad I read this; it certainly gave me a lot to think about. But It never grabbed me, and really was not a compelling read. ( )

Native Tongue is an interesting thought experiment with a lot to say about communication, language, and how both shape our reality.

The premise itself can be a hard pill to swallow - in 1991, women's rights were rolled back, they are no longer legal entities. A couple of centuries later, women live in a state somewhere between perpetual children and slaves. Given this premise, there is of course a lot of sexism in the book, and a lot of overwhelming feminism as well. This is one of Elgin's greatest problems - her men are so one-dimensional that it makes her well-drawn and interesting women harder to swallow. The sexism is so blatant, sudden, and unexplained that many in our group read are finding it hard to accept her premise and get beyond it to the ideas (and I understand why). And worse, it sometimes feels simplistic, which undermines some of her very interesting thoughts about power and language.

That said, I found this book fascinating and had a hard time putting it down. I read a decent amount of basic linguistic theory when I was in graduate school, and the idea that the words we have to express ourselves - the language we speak - not only affects what and how we can communicate with each other, but also the very thoughts we can have, the very reality we can perceive, is fascinating.

The joy this book held for me was not in its (quite flawed) exploration of the relationship between men and women, or even the powerful and the powerless, but instead in its theory-come-to-life approach to linguistics.

The story focuses on several powerful families who, almost literally from birth, are trained up in half a dozen languages each (hundreds, if not thousands, in total), including at least one alien language. These families are the only ones who can speak to hundreds of different alien species with any fluency, and thus they hold a lot of power over the world's governments and corporations.

There's a subplot about attempting to learn nonhumanoid languages and the impossibility of such, because our brains simply cannot perceive - or describe - the world in the same way.

And of course there's Laadan - the woman's language which is created in secret over generations as the precursor to what might be (or might not be) revolution. The idea here is that the languages they know are insufficient for women, and that claiming language is part of claiming power. That those who control communication in fact control everything. We can probably find a dozen modern parallels - the reclaiming of pejoratives by the groups in question, for example, or the effort of politicians and news media to find the appropriate 'spin.' The effort of foreign governments to forcibly silence voices of dissent.

Thus, women claiming a language of their own, a language which men cannot speak, a language which can be spoken aloud or silently with such subtly that men (for some reason) cannot seem to even detect it being spoken - is the first step to claiming a real power.

This book has faults to be sure. I agree with all the complaints about the black and white sexism and the one-dimensional men. But I think there is something very interesting and powerful here in the idea of language - Elgin's thoughts on a woman's language (she actually created Laadan and hoped it would catch on, as Klingon did) are faulty in a number of ways. But the text illustrated a lot of linguistic theory in really fascinating ways. ( )

The concept that the language we use structures the way we perceive the world, and vice-versa, forms the basis of this story. There is plenty of non-fiction that touches on this (I'd recommend Mark Abley's absorbing consideration of vanishing languages, Spoken Here) but, as a fiction device, it seems tailor-made for the speculative fiction genre—what would happen to a culture if a language was changed?

It's not new territory: Vance's The Languages of Pao explored this in the late '50s and Delaney's Babel-17 did the same in the '60s. However, Elgin brings a linguistic background to the table and, as you might expect, her story is more focused and deeper. Previous efforts used the hypothesis as a backdrop or a hook for an adventure plot whereas, in Elgin's story, there's much more sense that this hypothesis is the central point. Leaving aside a few minor moments where her science didn't make sense and some poor world-building skills, her conception would have made for interesting science fiction of the social variety.

It's only "would have" because there's this 800 lb. gorilla in the room.

This is a book that absolutely demonizes men. Set some 200 years in the future, humanity has adopted an utterly extreme extension of 1980s American conservatism. The most significant aspect of this is that women have been reduced to a legal status of dependent minors, completely controlled by men...and the men are despicable. Not some men. Not the men of one particular culture or religious sect. All of them, everywhere on the planet and out in space. The absolute best are emotionally abusive—the average man adds physical abuse—we won't even discuss the callousness of the "stricter" men. About the only way one can deal with the flatness of the depiction is to assume that it is a metaphor for patriarchy rather than an attempt to portray males. This weakens the book immeasurably because there is no instinctive recognition of truth to the situation.

It's a book that admits of no common ground between men and women and that, in the words of the authors of the Afterword, is "...[insistent] on seeing men and women as...groups necessarily opposed to one another in thought, action, and desire." And that means that there is no way for me to relate to the book beyond acknowledging its antagonism: accepting the attack rather than engaging in the discussion.

In the end, the book is interesting as a reflection of the times in which it was written, the divisive and often strident early '80s following the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. The bitterness and drama do not wholly surprise me. But, also in the end, it fails for me. ( )

A difficult book to evaluate, particularly when one compares its first impact and its impact on rereading. When I first read this in 1984, I was absolutely fascinated with the subject matter, and absolutely taken with the story line. The book posits a future American society, at the beginning of the 23rd century, Many things have changed, but two stand out -- women are legally and culturally inferior to men, and humanity is in contact with extraterrestrial races, whose trade is essential to the human economy. Communications between the aliens and the humans are in the hands (or mouths) of a group of families known as Linguists, who have, therefore, enormous power. They also include wives and daughters who also serve as Linguists, but without seeing any real reward or achieving any real respect -- and therein lies the tale.

The good things about the book are a) the story, which I find compelling, and b) the presentation of linguistics . That presentation is expert, easy to understand, and central to the story. It's marvellous, but it's not altogether surprising -- Ms. Elgin is a linguist herself, whose non-fiction popular books ("The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" and "Genderspeak" among others) indicate her areas of interest, and her focus on linguistics in action. The politics were also, for a female reader right after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, alluring.

So what's the problem? Not much; this is still a terrific book, and I'll still give it the Full Five. The problem is one that often arises when one goes back to novels with a strong political point of view after a few decades have passed -- the book's viewpoint seems too narrow and too limiting. Ms. Elgin's sympathy for the women tends to show up in female characters who are pretty much all good, and pretty much totally victimized, and in male characters are a really nasty lot. If I had written a novel right after the ERA went down, it might well have had the same (dare I say strident?) undertone; times change, and so do perceptions.

Despite this quibble, I really like this book a whole lot. ( )