Native Tongue is a feminist science fiction novel by American writer Suzette Haden Elgin, the first book in her series of the same name.

The trilogy is centered in a future dystopian American society where the 19th Amendment was repealed in 1991[1] and women have been stripped of civil rights.

Native Tongue follows Nazareth, a talented female linguist in the 22nd century – generations after the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

[4] Elgin has said about the book: Native Tongue was a thought experiment, with a time limit of ten years.

My hypothesis therefore was proved invalid, and the conclusion I draw from that is that in fact women (by which I mean women who are literate in English, French, German, and Spanish, the languages in which Native Tongue appeared) do not find human languages inadequate for communication.