Searching for title of book about unique languages

hypostatic

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Hi,

I've been searching for a while for the title of a book (I think it's a series) written by a female science fiction author about an alien civilization in which people have individual, unique languages. The story is largely one about communication, and I think the main character is a strong female. It might possibly have been written by a feminist author, I'm not sure.

I would greatly appreciate help with this!
 
Suzette Haden Elgin has written feminist sf novels about communication and languages, but I don't think any of hers match the précis you've given.
 
"Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper - such a wonderful story! - has a very strong woman linguist on Mars, who finally decodes the Martian written language, with no help but some hindrance and professional discourtesy from her fellow scientists.

If not the one you wanted, still wowsome excellent!
 
Juliette Wade is an Anthropologist and Linguist and has had numerous stories appear in ANALOG and Asimov's Mags, over the last five or ten years. The plots usually revolve around linguistical puzzles.

Sorry, I can't name anything specific that matches the description.
 
How could anyone including me overlook "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang?

It matches everything in the question except ". . . in which people have individual, unique languages".

Aliens: check.
The visiting aliens have a language that Earth's greatest linguists and diplomats cannot solve. Even less can the military controllers.

Although each alien does not have different languages, their representation, or symbol, is not a dead written form or sound that we call a "word", but a complex changing and changeable symbol that has a closer relationship with, and affects, the reality it represents.

And the minds and perceptions of those using the language. If a human spoken and written language affects, filters, distorts, deletes, generalizes, freezes in time, and limits how one perceives the reality that is already limited by the sense receptors, how much more could a fluid, four-dimensional alien language affect one's perceptions?

It is not frozen in time.

Living semantics that even Korzybski may have understood, or may have missed.

In that it surpasses even Tweel's living language that puzzled the scientists on Mars: his word for himself or his people changes with each use, making it a more versatile, representational, less frozen, less static, less generalizing, word.

A strong woman, a scientist, begins to solve the language barrier: check.
Very similar in that to H. Beam Piper's "Omnilingual" in that respect.

It was dramatized in the film "Arrival". I read the story so many years before the film that there was no need to smugly think, "The story was better". There is another reason not to think so: and that is that "Arrival" is magnificent.
 
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