Native Tongue (1984)

Elgin follows women across decades in a future that prizes their translation work while denying them authority over their lives. The older women of the Barren House turn the skills and relationships others discount into a collective language project. It belongs for that sustained, shared resistance, not for one all-knowing matriarch. Begin with this first volume of the trilogy; its claims about language shaping thought are a fictional experiment, not settled linguistic science.