Suzette Haden Elgin - Native Tongue (epub)

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.

Title: Native Tongue
Series: Native Tongue 1
Author: Suzette Haden Elgin
Published August, 1984, DAW Books
ISBN: 1558612467
Language: English
Length: Paperback, 320 pages