Fiction about language, part 1
Hello, all!
In Filling Your Worlds news, I have proofs from KDP and mostly just need to hit “go” on their site, so hopefully in the next week or two (they say it can take a few days to go live) you’ll be able to buy it on paper. The epub edition on Amazon is converted from the Euro price of 12.99, and there’s nothing I can do about that, but it’s listed on itch for $12.99. Pick your poison.
In novel news, I wrote most days in August and am around 30k words into the complete rewrite. (I have really got to learn how to outline, but it’s SO boring…) I plan to continue to write at least several days a week for the foreseeable future with the goal of having a complete manuscript by December, so I can take advantage of the winter roller derby break (no weekend practices!) to do things like fill in the emotions.
My first drafts are always very much “just the plot, ma’am,” with enough exposition and description of the feelings for me to go back and add something real in later. Some scenes have more feelings than others, because of how they come out when I’m writing, so it’s really a mess. I have to know what happens before I know what my characters think about it. And my ideas of what’s going to happen don’t always survive contact with the narrative.
Fiction about language
I’ve had this skeet open in my browser for seven months, apparently, because I wanted to go through and read the stories and discuss them with you, my dear readers. And faced, once again, with the end of the month and not a lot of time for a good research project, I am going to start in on the list.
This year, the Hugos had a special category for poetry, and “A War of Words,” by Marie Brennan (Strange Horizons) won. When I read it, I thought of “Give Me English” by Ai Jiang (Shortwave Publishing), which was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2023. Since they have similar themes, I thought I’d discuss them both.
In “Give Me English,” Jiang writes about a young Chinese immigrant to America who trades her Chinese words for English ones so she can improve her chances at getting a job. Except rent is very expensive, so she keeps having to trade her vocabulary (in both Chinese and English) for things like food and rent. The science-fictional element is the LangBase, some sort of implant or other technology that allows people’s vocabulary to be limited, decreased, and increased by the app. And, of course, you have to pay to use the app. (I am not going to evaluate whether it’s realistic; that isn’t the point of this story.)
If somebody says a word that’s not in your LangBase, or if you read one, you hear it garbled or see it blurred. The narrator has a conversation with her parents, for which she trades some spare thes to afford the call, where she barely understands her mother, who is the one who urged her to go to America for a better life than her parents could offer her as factory workers. But, according to the narrator, you need to have at least three languages to get a good job in America, and she’s traded away almost all her Chinese, so she’s barely even monolingual in English now.
This story is about language loss after migration, with the added layer of a rent-seeking hypercapitalist technofuture. This is a process that happens in the real world, though usually in the second generation, because the immigrant parents want their children to assimilate and have a better chance at getting a good job and so on by speaking the dominant language.
There’s another major factor in play, which is the way the dominant-language culture treats children raised in a home where the language spoken isn’t the same as the dominant one. For many years (and, unfortunately, still today), people believed that children raised in a bilingual household would never gain full competence in either language, but that’s a myth. Bilingual children do seem to hit language milestones a little more slowly, but they hit them nonetheless. I have only skimmed this article (2010), because it’s from a psychiatry journal, but I want to highlight this section:
Maintaining the first language is important for guaranteeing access to family and community supports and protective factors. There has been a poorly substantiated but unfortunately common practice of recommending to parents that they discontinue exposure to one of the languages (typically the home language) when a child is facing cognitive, language or learning delays, without consideration of the social and family consequences of this recommendation. This practice has little or no empirical support, and some research suggests that children with language impairment can be healthily exposed to and learn two languages,57 even with benign manifestations of language impairment in both languages.
So, the science is in, but getting people to follow it will take a lot of time.
Brennan’s poem is also about losing words, but through conquest, rather than immigration. The people across the bay come raiding and steal words and names for things for themselves, so that the narrator’s people don’t have the words anymore. It’s a poem, and it’s much shorter than Jiang’s story, so there’s not as much text to discuss, only subtext and vibes.
In the real world, when words are borrowed from another language, they also stay in the original language. The other language may alter the meaning in some way (see English angst meaning ‘an existential crisis’ vs. German Angst meaning simply ‘fear’), but the original word is still there. But this is speculative poetry, so the raiders from across the bay could be using magic or something science fictional.
Poetry is something that doesn’t always (or even usually, depending on whom you ask) have a right answer to the question “What’s it about?” To me, this is a metaphor for language attrition and death via colonization, whether that’s what Brennan intended or not. As such, it’s a nice complement to Jiang’s story.
Have you read these pieces? What did you think? I’ll see if I can figure out how to turn comments on for the web version so you can discuss. (Or chat on bsky, though I don’t spend a lot of time there lately.)
Until next time!
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