Newspeak

Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of the 1949 dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'', by George Orwell. In the novel, the Party created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania. Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing 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 are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak—''Ingsoc'' (English Socialism), ''Minitrue'' (Ministry of Truth), ''Miniplenty'' (Ministry of Plenty)—are described by Orwell as similar to real examples of German and Russian contractions in the 20th century. Like ''Nazi'' (''Nationalsozialist''), ''Gestapo'' (''Geheime Staatspolizei''), ''politburo'' ( Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), ''Comintern'' (Communist International), ''kolkhoz'' (collective farm), and ''Komsomol'' (communist youth union), the contractions in Newspeak, often syllabic abbreviations, are supposed to have a political function already in virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice-sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker.

The word ''Newspeak'' is sometimes used in contemporary political debate as an allegation that one tries to introduce new meanings of words to suit one's agenda.

Orwell and Newspeak

Orwell was interested in linguistic questions and questions pertaining to the function and change of language. This can be seen in his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) as well as in the Appendix to ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''. As in "Politics and the English Language", the perceived decline and decadence of the English Language is a central theme in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' and Newspeak. In the essay Orwell criticises standard English, with its perceived dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he would later satirise in the meaningless words of ''doublespeak'', the product of unclear reasoning. The 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."

Orwell's main objection against this decline of the English language is not so much based on aesthetic grounds, but rather that for him the linguistic decline goes hand-in-hand with a decline of thought, the real possibility of manipulation of speakers as well as listeners and eventually political chaos. The recurring theme in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' of a connection between authoritarian regimes and (authoritarian) language is already found in "Politics and the English Language":

Newspeak is a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, in which Orwell showed interest while working at the BBC during the Second World War (1939–1945), but soon came to see the disadvantages of. Newspeak has considerable similarities to the system of Basic English proposed by Charles Kay Ogden in 1930. Basic ('British American Scientific International Commercial') English was a controlled language and designed to be an easy-to-learn English with only 850 core words. Like Newspeak, the Basic vocabulary is classified into three categories, two of them with two subcategories. The classification systems, however, do not coincide.

Principles

The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent in ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English). In order to reduce the language's function of communication, Newspeak uses concepts of simple construction, such as pleasure vs. pain and happiness vs. sadness. Additionally, ''goodthink'' and ''crimethink'' linguistically reinforce the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania. The Party's long-term goal with regard to 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.

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 that are short and easy to pronounce. The Party intends to make speech physically automatic and intellectually unconscious in order 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 (for example, ''pluscold'' meaning "very cold" and ''doublepluscold'' meaning "extremely cold"). 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".

Thought control

The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to make all anti- Ingsoc thoughts "literally unthinkable" in terms of words. As constructed, Newspeak's vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express, while excluding secondary denotations and connotations, eliminating the ways of indirect thinking that allow a word to have additional 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 the absence 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'' (thought crime), '' doublethink'' (accepting contradictory beliefs), 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'':

Vocabulary

Newspeak words are classified by three distinct classes: the A, B, and C vocabularies.

The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life (e.g. eating and drinking, working and cooking). It consists mostly of English words, but they are very small in number compared to English, while for each word, its meanings are "far more rigidly defined" than in English.

The words of the B vocabulary are deliberately constructed for political purposes to convey complex ideas in a simple form. They are compound words and noun-verbs with political significance that are meant to impose and instill upon Oceania's citizens politically correct mental attitudes required by the Party. In the appendix, Orwell explains that the very structure of the B vocabulary (the fact that they are compound words) carries ideological weight. The large amounts of contractions in the B vocabulary—for example, the Ministry of Truth being called Minitrue, the Records department being called Recdep, the Fiction Department being called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department being called Teledep—is not done simply to save time. Like with examples of compound words in the political language of the 20th century—Nazi, Gestapo, Politburo, Comintern, Inprecor, Agitprop, and many others—Orwell remarks that the Party believed that abbreviating a name could "narrowly and subtly" alter a word's meaning. Newspeak is supposed to make this effort a conscious purpose:

The B words in Newspeak are supposed to sound pleasant, while also being easily pronounceable, in an attempt to make speech on anything political "staccato and monotonous" and, ultimately, mask from the speaker all ideological content.

The words of the C vocabulary are scientific and technical terms that supplement the linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. These words are the same scientific terms in English, but many of them have had their meanings rigidified in order to, just like with the A vocabulary, attempt to prevent speakers from being able to express anti-government thoughts. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party do not want the citizens of Oceania to know more than a select few ways of life or techniques of production. Hence, the Oldspeak word ''science'' has no equivalent term in Newspeak; instead, these words are simply treated as specific technical words for speaking of technical fields.

Grammar

Newspeak's grammar is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech (any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb), and heavy inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. Inflectional regularity means that most irregular words were replaced with regular words combined 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 (such as ''swam, gave,'' and ''brought'') being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including ''to be''), 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

* "Un–" is used to indicate negation, as Newspeak has no non-political antonyms. For example, the standard English words ''warm'' and ''hot'' are replaced by ''uncold'', and the moral concept communicated with the word ''bad'' is expressed as ''ungood''. When appended to a verb, the prefix "un–" communicates a negative imperative mood, thus, the Newspeak word ''unproceed'' means "do not proceed" in Standard English.
* "Plus–" is an intensifier that replaces ''very'' and ''more''; thus, ''plusgood'' replaced ''very good'' and English words such as ''great''.
* "Doubleplus–" is an intensifier that replaces ''extremely'' and superlatives; to that purpose, the Newspeak word ''doubleplusgood'' replaced words such as ''fantastic'' and ''excellent''.
* "Ante–" is the prefix that replaces ''before;'' thus ''antefilling'' replaces the English phrase "before filling."
* "Post–" is the prefix that replaces ''after.''

Suffixes

In spoken and written Newspeak, suffixes are also used in the elimination of irregular conjugations:
* "–ful" transforms any word into an adjective, e.g. the English words ''fast'', ''quick'', and ''rapid'' are replaced by ''speedful'' and ''slow'' is replaced by ''unspeedful''.
* "–d" and "–ed" form the past tense of a verb, e.g. ''ran'' becomes ''runned'', ''stole'' becomes ''stealed'', ''drove'' becomes ''drived'', ''thought'' becomes ''thinked'', and ''drank'' becomes ''drinked''.
* "–er" forms the ''more'' comparison of an adjective, e.g. ''better'' becomes ''gooder''.
* "–est" forms the ''most'' comparison of an adjective, e.g. ''best'' becomes ''goodest''.
* "–s" and "–es" transform a noun into its plural form, e.g. ''men'' becomes ''mans'', ''oxen'' becomes ''oxes'', and ''lives'' becomes ''lifes''.
* "–wise" transforms any word into an adverb by eliminating all English adverbs not already ending in "–wise", e.g. ''quickly'' becomes ''speedwise'', ''slowly'' becomes ''unspeedwise'', ''carefully'' becomes ''carewise'', and words like ''fully'', ''completely'', and ''totally'' become ''fullwise''.

Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise".

List of Newspeak words

This is a list of Newspeak words known from the novel. It does not include words carried over directly from English with no change in meaning, nor does it include regular uses of the listed affixes (e.g. ''unbellyfeel'') unless they are particularly significant.

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 (e.g. "bb", "upsub") come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak.

*ante — The prefix that replaces ''before''
*artsem — Artificial insemination
*bb — Big Brother
*bellyfeel — The blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea
*blackwhite — To accept whatever one is told, regardless of the facts. In the novel, it is described as "...to say that black is white when he Party says so and "...to ''believe'' that black is white, and more, to ''know'' that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary". (See also 2 + 2 = 5)
* crimestop — To rid oneself of or fail to understand unorthodox thoughts that go against Ingsoc's ideology
* crimethink — Thoughts and concepts that go against Ingsoc such as liberty, equality, and privacy, and also the criminal act of holding such thoughts. Frequently referred to by the standard English “thoughtcrime”.
*dayorder — Order of the day
*dep — Department
*doubleplusgood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "superlatively good", such as ''excellent'', ''fabulous'', and ''fantastic''
*doubleplusungood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "superlatively bad", such as ''terrible'' and ''horrible''
* doublethink — The act of simultaneously believing two, mutually contradictory ideas
*duckspeak — Automatic, vocal support of political orthodoxies
*equal — The same in amount or quantity. Not used in the sense of having equal rights or freedoms.
*facecrime — A facial expression which reveals that one has committed thoughtcrime
*Ficdep — The Ministry of Truth's Fiction Department
*free — The absence and the lack of something. "Intellectually free" and "politically free" have been replaced by ''crimethinkful''.
*fullwise — The word that replaces words such as ''fully'', ''completely'', and ''totally''
*goodthink — A synonym for "political orthodoxy" and "a politically orthodox thought" as defined by the Party
*goodsex — Sexual intercourse only for procreation, without any physical pleasure on the part of the woman, and strictly within marriage
*goodwise — The word that replaced ''well'' as an adverb
*Ingsoc — English Socialism (the political ideology of The Party)
*joycamp — Labour camp
*malquoted — Inaccurate representations of the words of Big Brother and of the Party
*Miniluv — The Ministry of Love, where the secret police interrogate and torture the enemies of Oceania (torture and brainwashing)
*Minipax — The Ministry of Peace, who wage war for Oceania
*Miniplenty — The Ministry of Plenty, who keep the population in continual economic hardship (starvation and rationing)
*Minitrue — The Ministry of Truth, who manufacture consent by way of lies, propaganda, and distorted historical records, while supplying the proles (proletariat) with synthetic culture and entertainment
*Oldspeak — Standard English
*oldthink — Ideas from the time before the Party's revolution, such as objectivity and rationalism
*ownlife — A person's anti-social tendency to enjoy solitude and individualism
*plusgood — The word that replaced Oldspeak words meaning "very good", such as ''great''
*plusungood — The word that replaced "very bad"
*Pornosec — The pornography production section (Porno Sector) of the Ministry of Truth's Fiction Department
*prolefeed — Popular culture for entertaining Oceania's working class
*Recdep — The Ministry of Truth's Records Department, where Winston Smith rewrites historical records so they conform to the Party's agenda
*rectify — The Ministry of Truth's euphemism for distorting a historical record
*ref — To refer (to someone or something)
*sec — Sector
*sexcrime — A sexual immorality, such as fornication, adultery, oral sex, and homosexuality; any sex act that deviates from Party directives to use sex only for government approved procreation
*speakwrite — A machine that transcribes speech into text
*Teledep — The Ministry of Truth's Telecommunications Department
*telescreen — A two-way television set with which the Party spy upon Oceania's population
*thinkpol — The Thought Police, the secret police force of Oceania's government
*unperson — An executed person whose existence is erased from history and memory
*upsub — An upwards submission to higher authority

See also

* 2 + 2 = 5
* Authoritarian socialism
* Glossary of Nazi Germany
* Groupthink
* Language and thought
* '' LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii'' ("The Language of the Third Reich")
* Logocracy
* Philosophy of language
* Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
* Linguistic determinism
* Soviet phraseology
* Un-word of the year

Fiction:
* Ascian language
* Nadsat

Notes

References

Further reading

*Burgess, Anthony. '' Nineteen Eighty-Five''. Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1978. . Anthony Burgess discusses the plausibility of Newspeak.
* Green, Jonathon. ''Newspeak: a dictionary of jargon''. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 1984. .
* Klemperer, Victor. ''LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen.''. Original German language editions.
* Klemperer, Victor & Watt, Roderick H. ''LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook''. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. . An annotated edition of Victor Klemperer's ''LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen'' with English notes and commentary by Roderick H. Watt.
* Klemperer, Victor & Brady, Martin (tr.). ''The language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook''. London, UK; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 2000. (alk. paper). Translated by Martin Brady.
*Young, John Wesley . ''Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents''. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. . John Wesley Young wrote this scholarly work about Newspeak and historical examples of language control.
The Principles of Newspeak

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Censorship
Constructed languages introduced in the 1940s
Controlled English
Fictional elements introduced in 1949
Fictional languages
Historical negationism
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Political linguistics
Propaganda techniques using words
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Words originating in fiction