Native Tongue

Signed paperback original, 1984

Native Tongue is the first novel in Elgin's feminist science fiction trilogy, set in a 23rd-century United States where the 19th Amendment has been repealed and women have been stripped of legal personhood, classified as minors regardless of age and prohibited from holding property, employment, or public office without male authorization. Society is dominated by a caste of hereditary linguist families who serve as the sole interpreters between humanity and the alien species now conducting trade with Earth. The women of these linguist households, working in secret across generations, have been constructing a language of their own, Láadan, designed to express the experiences and perceptions that existing human languages have no words for. The novel is as much about language as a form of power and resistance as it is about oppression itself. Elgin, a linguist and professor, actually constructed Láadan as a functional language and published a grammar for it. Published a year before Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Signed by Elgin on the title page. Scarce, especially signed.

Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. New York: DAW Books, 1984. ISBN: 0879979453. #10618.
Fine, unread copy.