I want to learn Láadan

What is Láadan?

Láadan is a constructed language (“conlang”) whose first version was published by the feminist science-fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin (1936-2015) in 1982.

Elgin’s purpose was to create a language more suited for women, to let them express their thoughts more easily and naturally, or at least more so than in the “natural” languages, whose evolution is heavily influenced by the societies in which they are. As our societies are patriarchal, so are our languages, thought Elgin.

I’m not linguist nor sociologist, but I do think she was right. As I’m not a woman nor queer either, and as I didn’t learned the language (yet), I prefer to put no judgement on the way she tried to attain her goal. If that interests you, you may want to read this little (and smolwebish) page on the WWW:

http://laadan.ayadanconlangs.com/

Or, for more information, the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1adan

The r/Laadan community want to bring together people desiring to learn Láadan. I may participate; thus you could here again of this experiment, and what I think about it.

[HTTPS] The discussion in r/Laadan about this group learning proposition

Why would I learn Láadan?

Why do I want to learn a “women-centered”, as say Wikipedia, as a cishet man?

There is, of course, a linguistic, or more precisely an *interlinguistic* motive. I love conlangs, and Láadan is at the same time successful enough to have a true community, even if small, and is different enough from what I learned to interest me, like, for example, Lojban (which is a try to construct a perfectly logical language) or Kotava (which try to be as neutral as possible).

I will not enter here the debate about the possibility for a man to be feminist, but *a minima*, I consider myself an ally of this cause. I may never understand plainly what does it mean to be a woman in our patriarchal societies, but the experience could be interesting to approach how *a* woman (I’m not sure Elgin’s conclusions are universal among women) thought what the “mental” differences between women and men could be, and listen to other women and men who tried too.

Since I learned Esperanto I tried to learn a few other conlangs, generally unsuccessfully (the only exceptions being Ido, very much similar to Esperanto, and Volapük, but I still make a lot of beginner errors in that language). I hope I will not make the same errors with Láadan, and the grouped learning may help me.

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Author: Adou (CC BY-SA 4.0)

3x37zj4e@anonaddy.me

Subject: Esperanto and linguistics