To really push that envelope and find ourselves in a situation where we want to express ourselves and we simply can’t. And we’ve all been in situations where we’ve felt like we can’t say what we’re thinking for whatever reason, and I think it’s got to be quite horrible to push that to extremes. If we are limited in what we can say, obviously that doesn’t mean we’ve lost our linguistics capacity, but we are certainly silenced. But we’re the only ones that actually have language. Dogs communicate, as do many other animals.

We’re not talking about communication, we’re talking about language, whether it’s signed or spoken.

Even women aside, we’re the only species that has language in a linguistic capacity. So if that’s taken away, what a shock that must be. And it’s something that we very much take for granted because we do it so well and so perfectly by the time we’re 3- or 4-years-old with no instruction. After all, using language is something that we all do all the time.Ĭhristina Dalcher: Absolutely. PoR: What is it about language that made you want to write about it in such a way? Specifically the idea of limiting what we’re allowed to say. From something like 16,000 to 100, which is an extreme limitation. PoR: When I think about your book Vox, there is a Margaret Atwood quote I keep coming back to from The Robber Bride, which is “War is what happens when language fails.” In Vox, women are very limited in how many words they are allowed to use in a given day.Ĭhristina Dalcher: Yes, extremely. Perspectives on Reading was recently given an opportunity to speak with Dalcher about her book and the importance of language. In its review, Publisher’s Weekly said Vox “carries an undeniably powerful message,” while Library Journal called it a “page-turning first novel.” Dalcher is also a writer of flash fiction (short, short stories) and previously taught undergraduate and post-graduate courses in linguistics, phonetics and phonology as well as writing and rhetoric. How would you communicate with the people you love? This is the world envisioned by writer and linguist Christina Dalcher, whose 2018 dystopian thriller, Vox, examines a world in which women are systematically silenced. Imagine if you were limited to 100 words a day.

By Jill Grunenwald, Staff Writer | November 2018

Q christina dalcher