1984 Newspeak
Newspeak is a fictional language created by George Orwell in his novel "1984." It is characterized by its deliberate reduction of vocabulary and the elimination of words that could express unorthodox or rebellious thoughts. Newspeak is designed to limit freedom of thought and promote the ideology of the ruling party, making it a tool for political control and manipulation.
6 Key excerpts on "1984 Newspeak"
eBook - ePubFraming Discourse on the Environment
A Critical Discourse Approach
- Richard Alexander(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...(1979:2–3) acknowledge that “Orwell recognized some of the connections between language, ideas and social structure which are at the centre of our argument, and in his novel 1984 he explored the notion that language-structure could be mobilized to control or limit thought” in their preface. As they say: “His concepts of ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’ and ‘duckspeak’ rest on recognizable principles of language-patterning.” Perhaps such a linguistic approach would be of direct value in a critical account of contemporary culture. Take Hodge and Fowler’s comment on 1984 (1979:6): “[F]or a novel which has had such an impact on our general consciousness about the language of politics, 1984 ’s analysis of this topic is curiously underestimated. It is as if the talismanic words ‘Newspeak’, ‘reality control’ and ‘doublethink’ have passed too quickly into the English language.” How would Chomsky’s work fit in here? Considerin the role of language in propaganda alongside the other devices of Western propaganda systems can be of benefit Even if the focus is not explicitly on the forms of language for Chomsky, Chilton shows a shared concern and orientation with Chomsky, writing (1988:79): “The purpose of these propaganda systems is, to quote Noam Chomsky [(1979:38)], ‘to fix the limit of possible thought’.” Chomsky’s very words themselves are reminiscent of the creatively destructive ‘lexicographer’, Smythe, who tells Winston in 1984 (Orwell 1949:45) that “the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought”. Hodge and Fowler (1979:24) hold that Orwell saw “clearly that the social structure acts on every aspect of personal behaviour, affecting active and passive linguistic experience...
eBook - ePubThe Universal Translator
Everything you need to know about 139 languages that don't really exist
- Yens Wahlgren(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- The History Press(Publisher)
...Presumably, this is because the first generation to have Newspeak as their mother tongue should have grown up by then. Proles, the Oceania masses, are not members of the Party and are not expected to learn Newspeak, at least not yet. Thus, the proles still converse in Oldpseak with no Newspeak words mixed in. George Orwell was a dedicated socialist and became very concerned about how he saw communist states developing. It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Soviet Union was the model for the oppressive state in 1984. Newspeak was based on another artificial language: Basic English. This international auxiliary language, created by Charles Kay Ogden, is a simplified variant of English. It contains only the 850 words you need in everyday life, plus a few hundred words for more specialised areas such as education and scientific terms. Does that three-part division of vocabulary remind you of anything? Basic English has only eighteen verbs and a greatly simplified, regular grammar. Ogden’s idea was that Basic English would be easy to learn as a second language and could function as an international auxiliary language, as well as a warm-up before learning the full English language. Orwell was initially a keen proponent of Basic English but turned against it a few years before he wrote 1984. Newspeak words, and the word ‘Newspeak’ itself, have become loanwords in several modern languages. ‘Newspeak’ has become a catchword in political debate when events are renamed, often with euphemisms, for political reasons, or when words are created or replaced with other terms considered more ‘politically correct’. Other Orwellian words that have become part of our collective mind include Big Brother, unperson, thought police and doublethink. Interestingly, one Newspeak word has reached a wide sphere beyond the novel: doublespeak. A teachers’ organisation in the USA gives out the ironic Doublespeak Award annually...
eBook - ePub- Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, Tony Trew(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In linguistics, thinkers like Whorf 7 have developed subtle forms of this theory, but the view in the Appendix is not subtle. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Old-speak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words (1984, ed. cit., p. 241). The method for achieving this control involves a simple but laborious method, based on a simple-minded understanding of language. Language is seen essentially as a set of words whose meaning is fixed and determined by dictionary entries. The lunatic logic of the Newspeak programme works by rewriting the dictionary, cancelling unwanted words and meanings. Quite apart from its implausible premise (in fact most people learn most words through use, not from a dictionary) this programme involves a number of contradictions. The aim of the dictionary-makers with their new words was ‘to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence’ (ibid., p. 246). But this elimination also meant an inclusion of the meanings of the old words in certain new ones, which ‘had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words’ (ibid., p. 245). So a single word in Newspeak might be immensely more meaningful than any Oldspeak word could be. The compression achieved by Newspeak (and the same could be said of Bernstein’s restricted code) could correspond to impoverishment of thought, or to richness of significance. These are opposites, so the whole programme of Newspeak is built on a contradiction. There is another contradiction to the programme...
eBook - ePub- Randolph Quirk(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Newspeak had the converse goal, just as Ogden’s critics said that Basic would have the converse effect. The Orwell conception is savagely Swiftian in its brilliance, and its impact has been understandably devastating. The rapidity with which general currency was given to items like doublethink and Newspeak itself (not to mention its many x-speak clones) adequately demonstrates the way in which the public imagination was caught, the extent – one might say – to which the public were given the instant conviction that such linguistic engineering was both plausible and deeply sinister. In fact, of course, the intellectual framework displayed in the principles of Newspeak (Orwell 1949, Appendix) is very weak and indeed damagingly inconsistent. I am not thinking of the paragraph which purports to explain why ‘euphony outweighed every consideration’ but is soon describing ‘a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous’, the words having ‘harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness’, though this is not untypical of the way Orwell is himself guilty of doublethink. It is of a piece with the rigorous control in Newspeak over ‘exactitude of meaning’ when Orwell wishes to stress one aspect of linguistic oppression; but, in stressing another aspect, he says that words had ‘the special function … not so much to express meanings as to destroy them’. What is more serious is that it is essential to the theory of Newspeak that limiting the number of permissible words automatically limits the number of possible thoughts. Without saying so, Orwell is thus making the claim that there is no such thing as metaphor: it is enough to say that rat refers only to the familiar rodent, and users of Newspeak are apparently ipso facto precluded from even the creative possibility of using rat to mean people who are as reprehensible as rats. In this, of course, we can accuse Orwell of no more than a naively inadequate understanding of language and the human mind...
eBook - ePub- Intelligent Education(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Influence Publishers(Publisher)
...1984 TEXTUAL ANALYSIS PART ONE, SECTIONS 1 - 3 1984 falls naturally into three Parts, with an Appendix on “The Principles of Newspeak” which is extremely important, and which will be analyzed separately in the present study. It will be compared and contrasted with Orwell’s key essay, written in 1946, entitled “Politics and the English Language,” an essay which contains not only the idea of Newspeak but also many of the concepts embodied more imaginatively in 1984. As the scenes succeed each other the novel is divided further, within each Part, into sections, for Orwell, by a technique of presenting representative scenes from the daily life of Winston Smith in 1984, wishes to paint a picture of the effect of a totalitarian society on the individual. The technique may be called “leaping and lingering,” and chronologically the action takes place over a number of months, as Winston becomes aware of the horror of his environment, seeks first to know more about it and then to change it, if necessary by violence, and finally is caught by the Thought Police and utterly destroyed as human being. Part One, containing eight sections of unequal length, deals with Winston’s questioning of the system and his dawning self-awareness and introspection (which the Party discourages), as symbolized by the initial step of his keeping a private diary. Part Two, by far the longest of the three Parts, begins with Winston’s serious acquaintance with Julia and then his mistaken confidence in O’Brien and his and Julia’s commitment, through O’Brien, to the objectives of the secret Brotherhood in its quest for the overthrow of Big Bother. Part Two ends with the capture of the two thoughtcriminals, Winston and Julia, and their imprisonment in the cellars of the Ministry of Love where they are to be tortured. Part Two contains ten sections...
eBook - ePubModern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought
Narratives of World Politics
- Adam Stock(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In addition to Newspeak terms such as “Big Brother” and “doublethink” even the term “Orwellian” has become the sort of cliché that Orwell himself railed against in the essay “Politics and the English Language” (1998, 17:429). Indeed, if according to the OED online edition “Godwin’s Law” states that “as an online debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis”, I wish to posit Stock’s Addendum, viz. that as an online debate increases in length Godwin’s Law has a direct, positive correlation with the probability of someone invoking the terms “Orwell”, “Orwellian”, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” or “Big Brother”, (and with much the same effects). The rhetorical manoeuvres mapped by Godwin’s Law and Stock’s Addendum share similar dangers: like the invocation of the horrors of the crimes of Nazism, drawing an analogy between a particular form of fictional world-making and political reality risks being read as mere hyperbole. Nevertheless, the widespread use of the term “Orwellian” demonstrates that many readers continue to have extraordinarily affective reactions to Nineteen Eighty-Four. For scholars across the humanities and social sciences, the politics of Orwell’s fiction is important to how we conceptualise and think about a variety of themes that go well beyond this one author’s work. It is my wager that while the catchphrases and images of Nineteen Eighty-Four have resonated across the broader culture, so too has its fabula. This chapter begins with a discussion of how Orwell integrates concerns connected to literary modernism, naturalism and the utopian/dystopian tradition into his novel. I argue that Orwell’s intervention into world politics is concerned with the intersection between the global and the everyday lived experience of the individual, embodied subject. Orwell’s engagement with the politics of literary form and especially modernists like T. S...
