“The Tower of Babble”?1 The Role and Function of Fictive Languages in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
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The problematic nexus of language, thought, and reality perception has been at the centre of speculation in utopian, dystopian, and science fiction from the beginning. Starting from a Judaeo-Christian background, early utopias speculated about the retrieval of the imaginary and idealized protolanguage, envisioning a perfect language everyone can understand. In contrast, modern science fiction (sf) novels foreground alien languages or modes of non-verbal communication and the inherent problems of translation. Novels using linguistics as a major plot device draw heavily on either the weak or the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its premise that speaking a different language precludes seeing another culture’s reality. Examples dealt with in this essay are Jack Vance’s dystopia The Languages of Pao (1958), Samuel R. Delany’s sf novel Babel-17 (1966), Ian Watson’s sf novel The Embedding (1973), and especially Suzette Haden Elgin’s transgressive utopian dystopian Native Tongue series (1984-1994).