Newspeak

Newspeak is the language found in George Orwell’s book about the future, “1984” (which he wrote in 1948). It is an English that is so limited that the only possible thoughts were those allowed by the ruling Party of IngSoc. Every year the dictionary became thinner and thought more limited as words were removed.

In 1984 most still spoke Oldspeak (English as we know it). Newspeak was seen only in the leading articles in the Times and in some of the speech of Party leaders. Newspeak would not take over completely till 2050. By then Oldspeak will have become a dead language.

Some Newspeak words (followed by their Oldspeak meanings):

• good – good
• goodwise – well
• plusgood – very good
• doubleplusgood – excellent
• ungood – bad

An example of Newspeak:

Times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unperson rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

Notice that the words are so limited in Newspeak that “well” and even “bad” are gone. For any idea alllowed by the Party there was only one word, such as “good”, from which other words could be formed.

This way of forming words seems ugly and unnatural in English, and Orwell knew it, but it is quite common in other languages. In fact, Orwell probably got the idea of forming words this way from Esperanto.

Orwell also knew about Basic English – an English with less than a thousand words. He wrote “1984” while working at the BBC, just when it was considering using Basic English.

In 1946, Orwell also wrote “Politics and the English Language”. In it he argued that written English was becoming so bad that it was making clear, honest thought almost impossible. To Orwell bad thinking leads to bad writing – but also bad writing leads to bad thinking. Thought and language go hand in hand.

It is just one step from this to Newspeak. Language is a medium to express thought, but it also affects thought. Therefore rulers could use language to limit the thoughts of the ruled.

Newspeak added some new words, like crimethink, duckspeak, bellyfeel and Minitrue, to help the Party faithful to have goodthinkful thoughts — or, better yet, to speak without thought (duckspeak). But for every new word, many words of Oldspeak were destroyed, words like honour, justice, liberty, science and religion.

Not only were words destroyed, but even dangerous meanings of the words that remained were destroyed.

For example, in Newspeak one could say “All mans are equal”, but “equal” only had the simple meaning of being equal in weight or size. What Jefferson meant by “equal” had been removed from the dictionary. The closest thing in Newspeak to what Jefferson meant was “crimethink”.

One could say “The Party is ungood”, but all the words and ideas needed to support such a thought were gone. So it became next to meaningless to say. For the same reason, it also became hard to think out the consequences of such a statement. Which was just the point of Newspeak.

– Abagond, 2006.

See also:

• English
  • Basic English
• dictionary
• Thinking in Common English
• Orwell
  • Orwell: Politics and the English Language
• Jefferson
• Eurocentrisms
• Whitespeak