Newspeak


Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalised such concepts into thoughtcrime as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.
In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Linguistically, the political contractions of Newspeak—Ingsoc, Minitrue, etc.—derive from those of German and Russian, which identify the government and social institutions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, such as Nazi itself ', Gestapo ', politburo, Comintern, kolkhoz, and Komsomol. The long-term political purpose of the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050; during those 66 years, "the usage of Oldspeak shall remain interspersed among Newspeak conversations."
Newspeak is also a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, which Orwell showed interest in while working at the BBC during the Second World War, but soon came to see the disadvantages of. In the essay "Politics and the English Language" he criticises standard English, with its dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he would later satirise in the meaningless words of doublespeak, the product of unclear reasoning. Orwell's conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."

Principles

The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent to ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak in order to reduce the language's function of communication, by way of simplistic concepts of simple construction—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink—the last one of these which linguistically reinforces the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania. In Newspeak, English root words function as both nouns and verbs, which reduce the vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning. For example, think is both a noun and a verb, thus, the word thought is not functionally required to communicate the concepts of thought in Newspeak and therefore is not in the Newspeak vocabulary.
As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato rhythm, using words "with the stress equally distributed between the first syllable and the last" and that are easy to pronounce, as the Party intended to make speech on any matter not ideologically neutral physically automatic and intellectually unconscious, thereby attempting to diminish the possibility of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified into regular spellings; thus, better becomes gooder and best becomes goodest. The prefixes plus- and doubleplus- are used for emphasis. Adjectives are formed by adding the suffix –ful to a root-word, e.g. goodthinkful means "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the suffix –wise, e.g. goodthinkwise means "In an orthodox manner".

Grammar

The grammar of Newspeak is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech, and heavy inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. This means that any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb, and most irregular words were replaced with prefixes and suffixes. For example the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, with both ending in –ed. Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word steal is stealed, and that of the word think is thinked. Likewise, the past participles of swim, give, bring, speak, and take were, respectively swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked, and taked, with all irregular forms being eliminated. The auxiliaries, pronouns, demonstratives, and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word whom and the shall and should tenses were dropped, whom being replaced by who and shall and should by will and would.

Prefixes

In spoken and written Newspeak, suffixes are also used in the elimination of irregular conjugations:
Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise".

Vocabulary

Note: The novel says that the Ministry of Truth uses a jargon "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words" for its internal memos. As many of the words in this list come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak.
The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life, mostly of Oldspeak words. The words of the B vocabulary are constructed to convey complex ideas; compound words of political implication mean to impose and instill politically correct mental attitudes required by the Party. The words of the C vocabulary are technical terms that supplement the linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party do not want the citizens of Oceania to know more than one way of life and techniques of production. Hence, the Oldspeak word science has no equivalent term in Newspeak, and the entire English vocabulary used to describe science as a function of thought or habit of mind was also eliminated. Instead, there are simply specific technical words for speaking of technical fields.

Thought control

The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to express Ingsoc's worldview, and to attempt to make impossible all unorthodox political thought. As constructed, the Newspeak vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, whilst excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating the ways of indirect thinking that allow a word to have second and third meanings. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words.
The word free still existed in Newspeak, but only to communicate a lack of something, e.g. "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word could not denote free will, because intellectual freedom was no longer supposed to exist in Oceania. The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought; hence, words such as: crimethink, doublethink, and Ingsoc communicated only their surface meanings.
In the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary: