Lala (拉拉)

Lala is the warmest everyday self-name for lesbians across the Chinese-speaking world, and its origin is literary. In Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin’s 1994 novel Notes of a Crocodile, the narrator goes by the nickname Lazi; the book became a touchstone for Taiwan’s lesbian community, and “Lazi” became a self-name. Traveling to the mainland, it softened into the reduplicated lala. Online you will also meet “les” (a clipping of lesbian) and leisibian (a phonetic rendering of the same word).

Part of its charm is provenance: it grew out of the community’s own literature — not a clinical label, not a name assigned by outsiders. Taiwan still mostly says lazi, the mainland says lala; the meaning is the same.

Register note: in-community and between friends. Formal writing uses nü tongxinglianzhe (“lesbian”) or nü tongzhi.

Common misreading: assuming lala names a particular style or role within lesbian culture. It is an umbrella, independent of presentation; some bisexual women use it for themselves too — follow each person’s own usage.