Native Tongue
Ratings2
Average rating5
15
Ratings2
Average rating5
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.
Series
2 primary booksNative Tongue is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 1984 with contributions by Suzette Haden Elgin.
Reviews with the most likes.
We are two centuries into the future, and the world has become a misogynistic nightmare. Women have been stripped of all rights and solely exist to serve the men. The world has also expanded into alien spaces, and capitalism blooms through commerce with the alien races. Crucial for successful trade are native speakers of the alien languages. Human infants are paired with Aliens to acquire difficult non-human languages from birth. The power of languages is evident, and the women are secretly trying to develop one of their own.
I love the field of linguistic relativity, how one's native tongue influences one's worldview. And how the power of language can bring forth change. I fault this book for teasing this perfect setup, and then never getting to the punch, because this is only book 1 in a series. The plot pulls you along, the writing is smooth, and occasionally very wry and clever in how it depicts the gender interactions (Nazareth experiencing first love was such a gut punch).
This naturally all should lead to a heroic revolution, because if not, I'd be a bit annoyed at the overly simplistic binary depiction of the genders. All the women are secretly sly, while all men are clueless and devoid of empathy. Which does not feel like a realistic sustainable scenario.
