Unlike many (most? all?) of the authors discussed in this column so far, Suzette Haden Elgin was actually a linguist. She held a PhD in Linguistics from UC San Diego and was a professor of linguistics at San Diego State. Her academic career seems to have focused on literacy and language education, with a secondary focus in feminist linguistics and gender studies. She also wrote a series of books on The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and was influential in the conlang sphere.
In a keynote address at the Conference on Gender Research at Hollins College in 1995, Elgin describes the theory of metaphor insertion as a method to achieve gender equality.
She defines a metaphor in this sense as a concept that is shared by nearly everyone in a society, and the first existing metaphor she discusses is “women are objects.” She describes the actions women as a class would have to take to reduce violence (by no longer being seen as objects) and dismisses them as improbable—because you can’t unify all women into taking a Lysistrata-like action together. And we would have to stop buying fashion magazines and clothes, consuming violent movies and media, etc, which is also unlikely to happen. Elgin states, “[t]hese games cannot be played unless we participate, and they are, almost without exception, language games.” So, in her argument, the only option we have to make change is through the insertion of a new metaphor into the societal consciousness:
You don’t use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE. And we know very well how to go about it. Our nuclear studies programs, where students learn the totally sanitized and domesticized language of nuclearspeak that makes it acceptable to name a missile “The Peacemaker,” are a magnificent model.
It is this belief that she elaborates on, extensively, in her 1984 novel Native Tongue.
Set in the late 22nd and early 23rd centuries, Native Tongue posits a misogynist dystopia, where women lose all rights in 1991 and become, legally speaking, children. US society (and the rest of the world, but the book focuses on the future US) has made contact with aliens as humans spread throughout the galaxy. For reasons that aren’t particularly well explained, there is a monopoly on translation services by Lines (families) of linguists, who have developed an Interface which allows infants and toddlers to natively acquire alien languages from the humanoid alien in residence (who is on the other side of the interface). It is impossible, according to the book, for humans to acquire languages from non-humanoid aliens, because “no human mind can view the universe as it is perceived by a non-humanoid extra-terrestrial and not self destruct” (66)…sigh (more on this below).
Society at large hates the “Lingoes” and thinks that they’re living high on the hog on their taxpayer money, when, in reality, the linguists have grueling language learning and translation schedules, because there are only so many people to learn so many languages. Another “delightful” feature of families of the Lines is that the girls have to get married at 16 and begin producing children basically every 2 years, so they can contribute 8 or 9 new linguists (and, thus, 16-18 alien languages natively spoken) to the family. When the women become too old to be bred anymore, they retire to the Barren House.
Buy the Book


Native Tongue
So: With this backdrop, we have a story that sort of follows the life of Nazareth Chornyak, who is the most brilliant wiz—er, linguist of her age, but which doesn’t really seem to be about her. Rather, it’s a story about two things: how horrible chauvinist men and the society they create are, and creating a language for women. The old women in the Barren House are publicly creating a language called Langlish, but this is a ruse to hide their real project, Láadan: a language which only women will speak, and they will have words to express things that women find important and that men find unimportant, and this new language will have the power to change reality. Women aren’t satisfied with the existing natural languages and their ability to express ideas. (Sigh. Again, we’ll dig into this in a moment.)
Before I get to the Whorfian issues, I want to point out the good things in the book. Elgin, as a linguist, had knowledge of language acquisition processes (as they had been theorized up to the early 1980s), and her explanations of acquiring a language natively square with the theories of the time, which aren’t too far off from present-day theories. Exposure to a language in infancy and toddlerhood from a native speaker will result in a native-speaking child, and this does not result in confusion or language delays for the child. There is a critical period from birth to about age 5 during which a child can acquire language(s) easily, and from age 5 to about puberty, it becomes more difficult to acquire a language. (This does not mean that learning a language is impossible; language learning and language acquisition are two separate phenomena.) One less realistic aspect is that the child acquires an understanding of culture while in the Interface, because that requires a different sort of exposure.
Her discussion of pidgins and creoles is a bit dated, here in 2020, but in line with the 1970s and ’80s. A pidgin develops in a contact scenario, and children develop grammar and expand the vocabulary, and when it has native speakers, it becomes a creole. Elgin implies that Láadan will need another generation after it becomes a creole “before it can be called a living language with the status of other living languages” (248), however, and this does not align with modern understandings.
Elgin also discusses the nuances of translation and understanding cultures through Nazareth’s work translating for a particular alien species. In her role as translator, she has to be able to recognize and understand cultural taboos and explain them to the human government, as in the negotiations with the Jeelods, who find the color blue taboo.
In the event that a native human speaker of an alien language cannot be found, there is a pidgin of sorts called PanSig, which may be a gesture-based language, but there may also be words. (This is not explained in much detail, just mentioned in asides.) It isn’t a language that can be used for negotiation, because the vocabulary is insufficient, but it can be used in a pinch.
Now, alas, we turn to the Whorfian aspects in this book… (Note: you can find a more detailed discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis here, if you need a refresher.) The premise of the thought experiment is twofold: 1) women want a language of their own, which they can use to express women’s things and 2) when people use this language and children learn it natively, it can change reality (via metaphor insertion).
Premise 1 assumes that in order for people to discuss a concept, there must be a word for it, and if one does not exist, one must invent it. Granted, it’s easier and more convenient to discuss something when you have a single word or morpheme or a short phrase to represent a complex or abstract concept, but it’s not impossible. This is tangential to the concept of untranslatable words, which don’t exist. Five years ago, we didn’t have a single word for a warm coziness that could be expressed by German Gemütlichkeit, but in 2016, the Danish word hygge started popping up everywhere—including on lists of untranslatable words. While it’s true that some words are more difficult to translate than others, all translation requires a good bit of approximation because of cultural context and the connotations that brings along.
Another assumption of Premise 1 is that women want this, or need it, because there are concepts that men find unimportant which women want to describe. Because they’re women’s things. This isn’t necessarily a problem linguistically speaking, but it is definitely a very second-wave feminist idea, rooted in gender essentialism. Or gender separatism. Either way, I don’t like the implication that I, because I have a particular phenotype, would necessarily want to express “women’s things.” But Elgin was writing in the same era that Deborah Tannen and Robin Lakoff published their pioneering texts on the intersections of language, gender, and culture, and this whole concept was a matter of discussion in feminist circles.
The second premise is where it gets really Whorfian. Having this new language would change women’s worldviews and enable them to transform the reality they live in:
“Suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then, as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change. Isn’t that true?”
“As true as water,” Nazareth said. “As true as light.” (250)
This ends up being, to an extent, true within the text of the book, because, once Láadan begins to be used, the women seem more agreeable to the men, and the men don’t like it and have suspicions about it. And to solve the problem, they build a separate house for the women, who then get to live apart from the chauvinist pigs.
But do women really want our own language? In a 2007 interview on Absolute Write, Elgin said that her thought experiment was not successful and her hypothesis, that women would either embrace Láadan and start using it, or they would create a different language and use that one instead, was disproved, and “and the conclusion I draw from that is that in fact women (by which I mean women who are literate in English, French, German, and Spanish, the languages in which Native Tongue appeared) do not find human languages inadequate for communication.”
So, do you think that a women’s language is a useful goal? Have you tried learning Láadan? If so, what did you think? Regardless of the real-world results of Elgin’s linguistic experiment, Native Tongue remains a thought-provoking work in many ways, and I look forward to your impressions in the comments…
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.
I’m not a linguist, but I used to drink with a couple, and I vaguely recall discussion of a historical “woman’s language,” in China. The exobrain tells me I was probably thinking of Nüshu, which apparently isn’t actually a language per se but a syllabary, and so probably lies outside of the Sapir-Whorf discussion.
Japanese has differences between men’s and women’s speech, but it’s not really different languages, just different pronouns and particles (and women tending to use more polite forms, which seems to be common in many languages). The Japanese syllabic hiragana script was once called women’s hand (女手), because women wrote in it while men used Chinese characters.
hygge is also fashionable in Germany (and supposed to be untranslatable). Of course discussions about “untranslatable” words always include translations of the words mentioned.
Otto Jespersen checked in on women’s languages/dialects in 1922, and it seemed pretty clear that the use of different pronunciations or constructions were cultural artifacts that did not result in conceptual misunderstandings by anyone of any gender.
One might make the case that the gendered use of distinct dialects or languages might result in gender-aligned differences in what concepts are emphasized, or how strongly some concepts are (or are not) associated with one another, on the basis that the linguistic components that help people convey and remember those concepts & associations–mnemonics, idioms, puns, etc.–will differ from one dialect/language to the next; but it still seems clear that, in such cases, it would be the concepts important to the (sub)cultures driving the language developments, not the other way around.
Interestingly, although Sapir-Whorf may have had its day, and gender-essentialist feminism seems dated, the creation of new concepts and words can create radically different results.
Consider intersectionality.
Consider the later concepts around gender. At the time, there was a lot of indignation by ciswomen about transwomen (I can actually see why: at the time it felt to a lot of women that men had got everything else and now they were coming for our oppression and our lived experience). But now concepts that barely existed at the time (including transmasculine people who were still subject to gender violence, non-binary and gender-fluid people) are part of public discourse. Only in about the last ten years: before that, the entire public discourse about transsexuality was “there are men who want to be women”.
These changes in concepts and discourse have spread because people needed or wanted them, not necessarily because they “really existed” as some sort of Platonic Form out there.
I think it’s kind of strange that so many people get hung up on words as neat little packages for concepts, to the point where they think if the package is not there then the contents don’t exist. Is that not the purpose metaphor and simile serve within language, or at least can serve very well?
Women’s speech like some of you mention (like in Japanese, with certain structures used by women, such as ending sentences with ‘wa’) are a different thing than La’adan. Some cultures have taboos around women saying certain things, like the names of older male relatives, so they have to refer to them in an indirect way. These are markers based in cultural norms.
Wub’s point that once we name a thing, we give it form, is a good one, and I agree. Having words for genderfluidity or nonbinariness or asexuality gives people a framework to have a discussion around, which is extremely valuable. These concepts already existed, and the people they applied to wanted a better way to discuss them. I’m intimately familiar with the power the feeling of “there’s a word for that? I’m not alone??” has.
This is, to me, a similar but non-identical idea to La’adan. Theorists looked at the existing terminology and came up with terms that worked better. (This is basically jargon in its strictest definition. A statistician’s definition of the word “significant” is different than an English professor’s.) Activists looked at the existing terminology and decided it was inadequate for their experience and started using terms that were better for them. People communicated these to each other, and with the internet, it became so much easier to do so. And now we have a flourishing vocabulary to talk about sexuality and the intersections of oppression. But it’s all still within the framework of (US) English.
La’adan, however, is an entire separate language, like Russian is to English. The words and grammar are constructed to reflect things that women* find important. Some of the things it does are pretty neat and exist in real-world languages, like evidentiality: I know it because I saw it myself vs I know it because X saw it and told me vs I know it because X heard about it from Y and then told me. Is that inherently important to the state of being female? This is my skeptical face. Sure, it’s cool, and it’d be interesting, but it’s not crucial enough for my general expression that I need a specific affix to mark it. Like, we can already do that in English with the phrase “my friend told me” or “I read on Twitter.” Is an affix more efficient? Yeah, probably, but evidentiality isn’t something I need to indicate every time I talk about something.
Our nuclear studies programs, where students learn the totally sanitized and domesticized language of nuclearspeak that makes it acceptable to name a missile “The Peacemaker,” are a magnificent model.
No nuclear missile has ever been named “The Peacemaker”.
Also, isn’t it a bit odd to say that current languages weren’t invented by and for women? Half the speakers of pretty much any language are women. (Exception: some dead languages of scholarship; I’m sure that a huge majority of mediaeval Latin speakers were men.) Certainly half the native speakers of pretty much any language are women.
Half the words spoken in any given language on any given day are spoken by women.
At least a quarter – and probably more, given that societies tend to be gender-split to some degree – of the two-person conversations in any language are between two women – and therefore, presumably, on a topic that at least some women find important or interesting enough to talk about with other women.
Given the way childcare and infant teaching responsibilities tend to be split, almost everyone who learns their native language learns most of it from a woman.
Hard to see, given all that, why languages should be systematically undersupplied in words for concepts that women find important.
It all sounds rather silly to me. It’s true that women in strongly gendered cultures develop their own sub-culture, which BTW tends to make the men nervous and uncomfortable, but is this kind of radical separatism something we should want? Heck no IMO!
@7:
A particular word or phrase can truly clarify meaning, or else convey a sense of community (or both). Yet in either case the power and value of that word/phrase lies in its ability to convey information to another mind.
It seems to me that a failure to grok this fundamental distinction–between the generation vs. transmission of an idea–is what leads people in the Sapir-Whorf direction, especially if it gets caught up with the unsubstantiated notion that the language that is most ‘efficient’ (i.e. uses the fewest syllables/symbols) in conveying a concept is inherently the best one for doing so.
Quantitative linguistics studies how the principle of least effort determines the length and number of words etc. Frequent words tend to be short. If you have a word for every concept you can express what you mean without the effort of long explanations, but you have to learn/remember a lot of words, which is more effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzerath's_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf-Mandelbrot_law / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law
(The German wikipedia articles about quantitative linguistics are often better.)
@11: In other words, people are lazy (in a good way)! :-)
Lessons can also be drawn from computer science, where there are hundreds of domain-specific and ‘esoteric’ programming languages which are exceedingly efficient for addressing problems or exploring concepts related to specific topics, yet these languages are completely impractical for any other uses.
I conclude that a language optimized for expressing and exploring feminist viewpoints might be quite useful for various philosophical and sociological topics…but, almost certainly, it would never become anyone’s, er, mother tongue.
My links-heavy response to #8 was lost in moderation (EDIT: see how this is numbered 14 immediately after 12 – an interesting bug/feature), so once again, TL;DR:
The LGM-118 Peacekeeper was hurriedly renamed from Peacemaker at the end of 1982, as attested by news from that time readily available in free online archives. So while it is technically true that there has never been a physical object officially designed both as a nuclear missile in general and “The Peacemaker” in particular (and SHE could have been a tad more exact in 1995), on the other hand the decisions of powers-that-be until that point, even though they involved symbolic concepts and metaphors, can easily be described as “nam[ing] a missile “The Peacemaker”“.
I read the Laadan novels more as a “What if language worked that way” rather than “Language works this way” even though I suspect the latter is more what the author meant. It’s not more improbable than hyperdrives and stuff, after all. I admit to enjoying the language SF stuff more than the “men are awful” bits, but again it’s not that far off a lot of regular genre stuff (I’m thinking of Larry Correia’s Son of the Black Sword type of book, which has basically the same attitude towards gender relations in society but no one in the text disapproves).
I loved the idea of Berlitz type households where everyone spoke a zillion languages. This is probably because I am stubbornly monolingual, despite what my Duolingo badges claim.
my elegy for SLE:
https://graywyvern.tumblr.com/post/41198825239/for-suzette-haden-elgin