The question that arises whenever a novel is reissued is “why now?” In the case of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, republished by the Feminist Press this month, the answer is evident: First published in 1984—one year before Margaret Atwood’s similarly dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale—Native Tongue is, depressingly, still extremely relevant.

The novel opens with a meeting of male linguists in the early 2200s, in a world that resembles our own, but with a few key differences. For one, the global economy relies on doing business with other planets, whose alien inhabitants speak complex foreign