Series
Native Tongue
Suzette Haden Elgin · 3 novels · 1984–1994
Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy (1984-1994) is set in a dystopian future America where women have been stripped of legal rights, and follows a family of professional interpreter-linguists whose women secretly develop Láadan, a constructed language built to express female experience that the existing languages of men can't capture. The trilogy follows the spread of Láadan among the oppressed women of the linguist households as an act of quiet resistance against the patriarchal order around them.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources
Reading order
The order the books came out.
Best read in the order they were published.
Map
Native Tongue at the centre, its books fanned around what holds them. Pick anything for its details, and zoom out for similar series in orbit — the reading order above lists the same books as text.
Stats
By decade
- 1980s2
- 1990s1
Shape
3 novels
1 author · completed series
reads like:science fictiongender and societynorth americanear futurechallengingadult
Mood
Grim and intense: 100% of this series' placed works, the catalog's 46%.
this series · the catalog · one dot = one book3 of 3 works carry a tone
Edges of the map
- Native Tonguedarkest · calmest
- The Judas Rosebrightest · most intense