In the Land of Invented Languages

matriarchy—where women are superior to men—or androgyny—where women are the same as men—but not a third alternative, where women are entirely different from men. Perhaps, as she explains in the introduction to her grammar of Laadan, the language she eventually created, it was because “the only language available to women excluded the third reality … the lack of lexical resources literally made it impossible to imagine such a reality.”

She had recently become aware, through a book she had been asked to review, of the “feminist hypothesis that existing human languages are inadequate to express the perceptions of women,” and she began thinking about what a language that did adequately express those perceptions might look like. And if there were such a language, how might it change the people who spoke it? How might it change society?

She wanted to explore these questions further, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. “A scientific experiment and a scholarly monograph would have been nice,” she wrote, “but I knew what the prospects of funding would be for an investigation of these matters.” So she took her questions to the laboratory of fiction, beginning her work on Native Tongue, a futuristic novel in which a marginalized class of women linguists create a language for themselves.

Elgin wanted to know, as a linguist, exactly how her fictional language worked, so she set about creating it, going far beyond the rough description and smattering of vocabulary of other fictional thought-experiment languages, such as Newspeak. She put her language to the test by translating various texts into it, in the process refining and expanding it, and by the end of 1982 Laadan had a well-defined syntax and a vocabulary of over a thousand words. Elgin began to see the possibility for a real-world experiment as well. If women really did feel that existing languages were inadequate to their perceptions, what would happen when they were offered a woman’s language? Either “they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction.” Laadan was released to the world when Native Tongue was published in 1984, and Elgin decided to wait ten years to see how it fared out there. She would declare the experiment a success or a failure by 1994.

Early on, Laadan was embraced by a small group of women science fiction readers who formed the Laadan Network. One of them put together a zine of contributions from the network—letters, comments, Laadan poetry, suggestions for new words. In 1988, the Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the group that organized the WisCon convention, published a grammar and dictionary of the language that included lessons and exercises.

Laadan establishes itself as a “woman’s language” through some rather obvious devices. It has the only language textbook I know of that gives the word for “menstruate” in Lesson 1. But the approach has a level of sophistication that far exceeds non-gendered pronouns or “womyn’s herstory”–type coinages. The language is meant to convey a female perspective in the way it carves up the world of experience into linguistic forms. The experience of menstruation, for example, is carved up the following way:

oshaana  — to menstruate

ashaana — to menstruate joyfully

elashaana — to menstruate for the first time

hushaana — to menstruate painfully

deshaana — to menstruate early

weshaana — to menstruate late

 

Pregnancy is also covered by a range of vocabulary items:

lawida        — to be pregnant

lalewida — to be pregnant joyfully

lewidan — to be pregnant for the first time

loda — to be pregnant wearily

widazhad — to be pregnant late in term and eager for the end

 

As is menopause:

zhaadin        — to menopause

azhaadin — to menopause uneventfully

elazhaadin — to menopause when it’s welcome

 

The effort to capture the perspective of women in words is not limited to the particularities of the female body. Other words cover a range of situations that could conceivably be experienced by men, but that are nonetheless designed to make you want to nod your head and go, “Uh-huh. Tell it, sister.”

radiidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help

rathom: non-pillow, one who lures another to trust and rely on him or her but has no intention of following through, a “lean on me so I can step aside and let you fall” person

rathoo: nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty

ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask

thehena: joy despite negative circumstances

bala: anger with reason, with someone to blame, which is futile

bina: anger with no reason, with no one to blame, which is not futile

aayaa: mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome

aazh: love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now

ab: love for one liked but not respected

am: love for one related by blood

 

The lexicon is shot through with fine distinctions in emotion, attitude, reason, and intention, presumably because these are aspects of experience that are important to women. The fact that English vocabulary doesn’t make such distinctions does not mean they are impossible to talk about in English, but, as Elgin stresses, it does mean they are more “cumbersome and inconvenient” to talk about, so that women are often accused of “going on and on” when they try to express their perspective on things.

The idea of female perspective is also carried by aspects of linguistic structure outside the word. Elgin, noting that women are often “vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient ‘But all I said was …’ excuse,” built into the syntax a requirement that speakers make clear what they intend when they speak. Every sentence begins with a word indicating the speech act being performed (statement, question, command, request, promise, warning) modified by an ending that marks whether that act is performed neutrally, in anger, in pain, in love, in celebration, in fear, in jest, in narrative, or in teaching. In Laadan the “It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it” objection can’t be so easily dismissed. If a person uses the marker for a neutral speech act and then tries to claim, “Hey, I was just kidding!” the responsibility is on the speaker for not being clear, and not on the hearer for taking it the wrong way.

Laadan speakers also have to take responsibility for the validity of what they say. Every sentence ends with an “evidence morpheme” in which the speakers make clear on what grounds they base their statements:

 

“They laugh”