Native Tongue

By Suzette Haden Elgin and Susan Squier

• Originally publised in '84 by DAW, sold 50,000. • Often compared to and paired with Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale • Best-selling author of the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series (Barnes & Noble imprint, over 1 million copies sold), often on tour, extensive major media interviews such as Good Morning America and the Today Show • Well known to science fiction fans, Elgin oftens attends conventions, publishes in sci-fi magazines, and is active on the web. • Afterword writer Susan Squier is a major critical voice in the field of literary science fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Release date: Aug 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781558617766

Reviews for Native Tongue

[vpfluke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is quite a book, and wanted to review it a little before returning it to the library. It portrays a society where communties of linguists provide enormous benefits for a future society which is having multiple contact with other species and needing people to cummunicate with them. So, the linguists live in kind of family communes, but they ae both needed and despised by the outside culture. To this is added that all women are kept in inferior positions in both groups. So, the novel unfolds with the women developing a side linguistic reality. The novel is filled with linguistic references, as this is the author's field. Stylistically, it is not as well written as it might be, but the novel does grip you at some point, and you really want to stay with it.

[psybre_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An important book, scathing in its unabashed portrayal of a future rife with sexism and subjugation of women. The linguistics, sociology and science are professionally applied; it looks at real challenges and possible solutions in communicating with alien cultures and how this might affect human societies. Brutal, riveting, and ultimately optimistic, Native Tongue is foremost a novel of feminist speculative fiction that remains engaging and fresh twenty-five years later. Recommended.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[wealhtheowwylfing · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[aerrin99 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[tloeffler_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jasmyn9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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

[comixminx · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[dkgullen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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. ~

[szarka_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Awkward writing and frequent axe-grinding mar what is otherwise a book full of fascinating ideas.

[tadad_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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, 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.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. I cannot connect with a single character of either sex: I despise the men and the women are my enemy, not by my choice but by theirs. 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. It takes two to have a conversation and, if the other side walks away, I am left with a book whose sweeping characterizations I found invalid.

[kaionvin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.)