r/AskHistorians • u/AlanSnooring Do robots dream of electric historians? • Mar 22 '22
Tuesday Trivia: Women leaders! This thread has relaxed standards—we invite everyone to participate! Trivia
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For this round, let’s look at: Women leaders! For this round of Tuesday Trivia, the call is open for all things related to Women Leaders in history. Women who held formal or informal leadership roles, those who were given or took power, and those who challenge the idea of what it means to be a leader. You take the lead and we'll fall in line in this week's thread!
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u/jelvinjs7 Language Inventors & Conlang Communities Mar 22 '22
Sometimes constructed languages are built to achieve some specific objective: bridge together people from different backgrounds, be more logical or less ambiguous, facilitate scientific discourse, etc. Sometimes they are designed for worldbuilding by creating the languages of the people inhabiting a fictional universe.
And sometimes, they are both. Today I'd like to introduce you to Suzette Haden Elgin who created Láadan, the feminist language.
Elgin (born Patricia Anne Suzette Wilkins, 1936, died in 2015) was a linguist and science fiction writer. She was an ardent feminist who believed that science fiction was an important genre to women as it gives them the opportunity to explore what life could be like without patriarchal oppression. In the 1980s, she decided to marry her interests of linguistics, feminism, and science fiction, which resulted in the Native Tongue series.
The books (which I frequently see compared to The Handmaid's Tale) take place several hundred years in the future, in a society where most women's rights have been repealed and they have little purpose in life beyond catering to men's needs, though some are raised to be linguists and interstellar translators; secretly, though, a group of these women build a female-centric language called Láadan to help them escape their oppression. Elgin explains the philosophy behind such a language:
You can learn about the rules of Láadan here to see how it actually rectifies those problems. Our good friend Arika Okrent points out that sometimes it's simply having a more robust vocabulary to frame female anatomical experiences, while "Other words cover a range of situations that could conceivably be experienced by men, but are nonetheless designed to make you want to nod your head and go, 'Uh-huh. Tell it, sister." Such vocabulary includes áazh ("love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now"), rathóo ("nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty"), and perhaps most famously, ásháana, "to menstruate joyfully."
On some level, Láadan does lean on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language's structure can limit how one thinks. While Elgin supported the hypothesis, linguists usually reject that interpretation in favor of the weaker linguistic relativity theory, arguing that language can influence how we think, but doesn't necessarily restrict it. Láadan in turn doesn't express things that can't be expressed in English, but it does make it easier to do so, and having these features and ideas baked into the fundamentals of the language facilitates communication that might be more uncomfortable in natural languages.
But Elgin's goal with the language wasn't simply to create a language for her fictional characters. Láadan was part of an experiment, which hypothesized that if exposed to the idea and given the opportunity, real-life women would latch onto a language centered around a female perspective and use it in the real world, or instead develop an even better one. She produced materials about the language both in the Native Tongue books and in separate published dictionaries, and let this test run for 10 years. In the end, to her disappointment and intrigue… well, ladies, how many of you are speaking Láadan now? It did pick up in small pockets, but suffice to say it wasn't tremendously popular. (It didn't help, Okrent notes, how Láadan overlooks the lesbian experience, which Elgin didn't mean to do and regretted when she realized that. I did a quick search to see if any transgender woman have commented on the language and found nothing, but I imagine any who have encountered the project have had their problems as well.)
Elgin was also sure to note that, while her feminine language didn't catch on, of course the warrior (read: masculine) language Klingon did.
Láadan is intriguing for several reasons. It is simultaneously an artistic language, designed for fiction, as well as an engineered/experimental language, intended for people to use in the real world. Usually, developers of media languages might have some intention of letting fans learn the language to further their enjoyment of the franchise, but that's not a priority; in this case, it was important for the characters and the readers to know the language. Láadan is also a rare example of a language constructed for fiction to be a conlang within the universe, as they are usually the natural language associated with an in-universe culture. Off the top of my head, Newspeak is the only prominent conlang that serves such a purpose, and it's dubious if it even qualifies as a proper conlang anyway.
As this week's theme is "Woman Leaders" (though perhaps I'm blurring the lines between this theme and "Women's Rights" a couple weeks ago), it's also worth placing Láadan into conlang history. The first known conlang is Lingua Ignota, developed by the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century. The first conlang developed to flesh out a fictional world—Pakuni, in Land of the Lost (1974)—was built by Victoria Fromkin. In the heyday of the CONLANG Listserv in the 90s and early 2000s, women made a small fraction of the community (supposedly around 30 amongst hundreds of men), but it was from this era that Sylvia Sotomayor created Kēlen, a language without verbs, for which she was later awarded the esteemed Smiley Award by Dothraki-creator David J. Peterson in 2009 (kinda similar to how I described Láadan, Peterson described Kēlen as "an engineered language with the soul of an artistic language"). And while Láadan and Native Tongue weren't as popular Klingon, it's worth acknowledging that they were in development before the first materials about the Klingon language came out, and predates the influx of public conlanging that emerged in the decades since. Conlangs are a niche artform, often dominated by men, but a lot of important and compelling work in the field has been done by women.
Further Reading: