Native Tongue

Suzette Haden Elgin

4 ideas

1. Barren House women build Láadan under cover

   In a future America where women lost their civil rights in 1991, women of the Lines, the hereditary linguist families who translate for alien races, are sent to Barren House once they are past childbearing. There they openly work on 'Langlish,' a harmless-looking constructed language that the men tolerate and mock. In secret they build Láadan, a language designed to encode women's perceptions, and plan to teach it to the girl children so it spreads as a native tongue.

2. Encoding: naming a perception into existence

   An 'encoding' is a single lexical item created for a perception that a language currently can express only through a long paraphrase, if at all. Once a recurring experience has its own word, speakers can notice it, refer to it, and share it instantly. That makes the experience socially real instead of a private, deniable feeling. Láadan's builders deliberately encode experiences common to women that existing languages leave unnamed.

3. A new language can change reality

   The novel argues, in the spirit of linguistic relativity, that language shapes what its speakers can perceive and think. By this logic, a language built around women's perspectives would do more than describe oppression: acquired as a first language, it would alter what its speakers perceive and would eventually alter social reality. The women therefore treat language design as political action, not as a hobby or an academic exercise.

4. Contempt blinds the dominant group

   Because the men of the Lines believe women are incapable of serious intellectual work, they see the women's language project as trivial and never examine it closely. The dominant group's own prejudice becomes the cover that lets resistance develop in plain sight. The subordinated group can then use the underestimation directly, through a decoy project that confirms the rulers' low expectations.

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