L I T E R A R Y H U B

is Science Fiction Novelist

Created a Feminist Language
from Scratch
 There's Even a Word For Emotional Labor!

By Rebecca Romney January 15, 2019

 

Can a language be designed speci cally to express the thoughts and feelings of women?
In 1984, the linguist Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a science ction novel to test this
question. e result was Native Tongue, a dystopian tale of a future America that has
been widely compared to e Handmaid’s Tale. It was a pioneering feminist
experiment, sold as a paperback original with a big green alien on the cover.

Suzette Haden Elgin began writing science ction in order to pay the tuition for her
PhD in Linguistics, all while raising ve children. e seed for Native Tongue came
from her reading in the wake of the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. Approved
by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment required the rati cation of 38
states to become law. But grassroots opposition over the next decade, strongly backed
by conservative women, arrested the momentum. It was after one this, one of biggest
formal setbacks for the feminist movement in the United States, that Elgin read
Cheris Kramarae’s Women and Men Speaking (1981).

Building on the work of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, Kramarae argued that
existing languages were too steeped in patriarchal ideas to adequately capture the
experiences of women. Intrigued by the idea of women as a “muted group,” Elgin
wondered what a language would look like if it gave women the power to speak directly
to their experiences. For Native Tongue, she forged an entirely new language, Láadan
(pronounced similar to “Latin,” but “as if [one] were trying to sing it”).

Constructed languages (or “conlangs”) have a long history in speculative ction.

Tolkien wrote e Lord of the Rings in pursuit of this “secret vice,” writing to his son
Christopher that the entire trilogy was in fact “an attempt to create a world in which a
form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real.” Meanwhile, the
conlang with the most speakers is Klingon, which also boasts translations of
Shakespeare and parts of the Bible. More recently, David J. Peterson built conlangs of
Dothraki and Valyrian for the HBO series Game of rones.
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Láadan, the conlang in Native Tongue, is distinctive

for its feminist philosophy, focusing on words that
e ciently describe “concepts important to women.”

Láadan, the conlang in Native Tongue, is distinctive for its feminist philosophy:
according to Elgin, it focuses on words that e ciently describe “concepts important to
women” and “emotional information.” Importantly, Láadan isn’t meant exclusively for
women: rather, it is a language constructed with feminist principles in its marrow. For
example, the Láadan word “radíidin” is immediately recognizable as a form of
emotional labor, the often invisible work that falls primarily to women:

“radíidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden

because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion…”

Interestingly, Elgin argues that creating a new language is not especially di cult;
indeed, there are a number of software programs that can help anyone do just that. e
hard part is making it a living language. Achieving that is “like writing a novel or
composing a symphony,” Elgin wrote on her website. “It’s not just a matter of meeting
technical speci cations. It could take a lifetime.” A living language requires its own
culture. e conlangs of e Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Game of rones all have
this in common.

To create the setting for her conlang, Elgin radically inverted the goals of the recently
failed Equal Rights Amendment: rather than ratifying a guarantee of equal legal rights
regardless of sex, Congress decides to do the opposite, ratifying amendments revoking
women’s right to vote and right to work outside the home without permission of a male
family member, then declares women legal minors. In this future dystopia, women are
legally subject to men in every way.

For many, Native Tongue’s setting will bring to mind Margaret Atwood’s e
Handmaid’s Tale, which was published one year later. Set in another patriarchal
dystopian future, e Handmaid’s Tale is not especially known for its subtlety—which is
unjust, as much of the brilliance of the book comes from Atwood’s semi-hidden
wordplays and her discipline in leaving large swaths of information unsaid. In
comparison, Native Tongue feels at times like a blunt instrument: it is text to Atwood’s
subtext. Yet this ought not disqualify Native Tongue from regard; as Marleen S. Barr
argues, feminist science ction “enlarges patriarchal myths in order to facilitate
scrutinizing these myths.” Science ction creates unfamiliar worlds in order to explore
concepts to which we are too close to see clearly in reality. Being extreme is a core
aspect of its value.
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“What would happen to American culture if

women did have and did use a language that
 expressed their perceptions? Would it self-
destruct?”

e characters of Native Tongue are professional linguists, serving as translators

between Terrans and other humanoid aliens across the galaxy. Using their daily lives as
a model, Elgin explores a number of linguistic concepts, from the native acquisition of
languages to the potential barriers in communication with aliens that don’t, say, have
mouths. Central to the con ict is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which suggests that
the structure of a language determines a speaker’s perception and interpretation of the
world. Elgin applies the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to her novel, eerily presaging the
impact of the #MeToo movement: “What would happen to American culture if
women did have and did use a language that expressed their perceptions? Would it self-
destruct?”

e plot of Native Tongue ows directly from these questions: knowing the potential
power of their new language, the women linguists prepare for revolution from their
oppressors. But perhaps the most subversive aspect of the book is that the protagonist
is a middle-aged woman past child-bearing age, a woman who is attempting to speak
about her lifetime of verbal and emotional abuse. Before she learns of Láadan,
Nazareth thinks to herself, “ ere were no words, not in any language, that she could
use to explain to them what it was that had been done to her, that would make them
stop and say that it was an awful thing that had been done to her.”

Láadan is more than a conlang. It is what is known as an engineered language,

designed as an experiment to test a speci c hypothesis. Quoted in the Afterword of the
2000 Feminist Press reprint of Native Tongue, Elgin stated her hypothesis was that
“language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change.”
After ten years and two more novels in the Native Tongue trilogy, Elgin believed that
her hypothesis failed. “Láadan got very little attention,” Elgin remarked in a 2007
interview. “Not once did any feminist magazine (or women’s magazine) ask me about
the language or write a story about it.” In fact, Klingon became the foil to her Láadan.
“ e Klingon language, which is as ‘masculine’ as you could possibly get, has had a
tremendous impact on popular culture,” Elgin observed. In a blog post on her
experiment, she couldn’t help but note, “Meanwhile, the Klingon language thrives —
from which you are free to draw your own conclusions.”

Rebecca Romney

Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer at Honey & Wax Booksellers, and co-author of Printer's Error:
Irreverent Stories from Book History (HarperCollins). She evaluates the collectible books on the HISTORY
Channel's show Pawn Stars at their rare books specialist. Romney is co-founder of the Honey & Wax
Prize, an annual award for an outstanding book collection conceived and built by a young woman.

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