Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them…. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships—a fantasy world for these girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons—how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.

The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before. … [Encodings were] precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. … “A woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue is a feminist science-fiction novel first published in 1984. The future it describes features an America in which women are considered biologically (and thus legally) inferior to men. But it’s also taking place in a time when humans are in contact with aliens, and only a handful of families have the ability to communicate in their alien languages. And the women of these linguist families are constructing a language that should make it easier for women to express their thoughts—which in turn will have powerful political implications. Suzanne and Chris explore the tremendous world-building of this novel.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping to edit this episode.

SHOW NOTES.

Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue. [Bookshop.]

Other words by Elgin: Judas Rose. Earthsong. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defence. A Third Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.

The homepage for Láadan.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

An article on Láadan and emotional labour.

Another article on Elgin’s influence.

Diane Wilson: The Seed Keeper.

Next: T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land.

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