Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin

Paperback, 327 pages

Published Sept. 1, 2003 by Spinifex Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-876756-05-5

(10 reviews)

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.

9 editions

Jonathan Zacsh reviewed Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin (Native Tongue Trilogy)

interesting universe in a series I'd never heard of, with good characters

5 stars

Such a good book. Highly recommend to any scifi fan, but probably not going to be a page turner if you aren't into scifi already (e.g. you frequently feel scifi is just all endless world building).

Edit: It's funny reading others' reviews of this book... I'd never have bothered picking this up, because so many readers are calling out poor character writing. That's my biggest pet peeve with older SciFi. I don't know if I loved this book because the concept carried me through, or if I just disagree about the characters, but I'm very glad I've read this and I'm definitely reading the next book in the trilogy.

loppear reviewed Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

Review of 'Native Tongue' on Goodreads

3 stars

Handmaids Tale set with aliens and powerful linguists as the protagonists... Less terror, more offhand patriarchal violence, the plot is more wandering. But the cutting satirical portrayals of men who are overly certain of themselves resonates piercingly.

inga-lovinde reviewed Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

Review of 'Native Tongue' on 'GoodReads'

3 stars

This novel is often compared to The Handmaid's Tale. True, it's the same white feminist speculative fiction, portraying a terrible unthinkable dystopia where white women are terribly oppressed by... having their own agency stripped from them (while being well cared about). So scary, so unbelievable, I cannot even imagine how people could deny other people agency. I mean, this never happened with white people before.
Needless to say, there are no people of color, no non-binary folks, no queer relationships. Everybody not fitting into white women-men dichotomy have simply vanished at some point of the history, and nobody noticed or deemed it deserving to be mentioned even in passing.

That being said, as opposed to The Handmaid's Tale, this novel has some plot which is interesting on its own; and the speculative fiction part is implemented with quite original setup with linguists and aliens (not going to write any spoilers …