Space Opera Fans discussion

Several space opera stories have a key character (not always the main one) who is a linguist. Most of the time these are first contact stories or in the early stages after first contact.

I read Ascending by Margaret Pechenick recently. In this one, the aliens found Earth, learned a couple of our languages, then contacted us. Later they proposed an exchange program, where some humans go off in their ships for a year, and some aliens stay on Earth, with the humans being expected to learn their main language. Main character is a linguist.

In The Marann by Christie Meierz the main character is a high school teacher of several languages who is known to learn languages quickly. Earth ships have made contact with aliens on a planet, and the leader asks for someone to live there and teach his daughter some of our Earth languages.

I have vague memories of an old story that might be The Man Who Counts by Poul Anderson about a first contact. The linguist learns all the prepositions and proper grammar, and the merchant (at a different location) just learns a few words and some gestures. The merchant actually communicates with the aliens because he has something he needs urgently. The linguist doesn’t get anything accomplished other than learning to speak properly.

Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells, which we read in 2016, is about an alien ship discovered floating in the asteroid belt around earth and the reluctant linguist who is recruited to join the first contact expedition.

Code of the Lifemaker features linguists and word games, too.

Hellspark by Janet Kagan which we have read before should count here too.

Teresa wrote: " Hellspark by Janet Kagan which we have read before should count here too."

I thought about that, but Tocohl is not really a linguist, she's a polyglot. She doesn't study languages, she just speaks a lot of them. But maybe I'm splitting hairs.

Suzette Haden Elgin's The Native Tongue series ( , , and ) feature many linguists.

I’d forgotten Native Tongue and its sequels. My vague memories of that series are yes aliens, no spaceship scenes, women being third class citizens, really strange subculture for the linguist families but having the young children learn alien languages makes a lot of sense.

It's been a few years since I last read it, but your memories align with mine.

Doesn’t Sundiver have some language stuff? Something by Alan Dean Foster, too. Maybe Cachalot

Linguistics plays a role in lots of SF. I’m sure there are Goodreads lists for that, but books like Snow Crash are in this area.