by Diana Hurlburt

Created on: October 24, 2008

English is today's lingua franca, the mother tongue of millions, and the foreign language learned most often worldwide. Imagine, then, an English whose vocabulary shrinks rather than grows annually, composed of tacked-together terms and meaningless phraseologythis is the Newspeak of George Orwell's 1984. Newspeak is possibly the most infamous tool in the Party's arsenal, specifically and even scientifically designed not only to discourage alternative thinking but to make it mentally and physically impossible to express independent ideas. The tenets of Newspeak align exactly with Big Brother's politics and the language complements the violence with which the world of Airstrip One is maintained.

Orwell's inspiration for Newspeak was the idea of Basic English, a "constructed" language which he had formerly supported before rejecting it in his essay "Politics and the English Language." For Orwell, English had begun to suffer from outdated form, stale or unclear (and therefore meaningless) metaphors, and pretentious diction. This combination of flaws created a vague, imprecise language in which meaning was chosen for words, rather than words being chosen for their meanings. When this fuzziness of language occurs, Orwell contended, it tends to rebound back into the speaker, causing their actual thought processes to degenerate. When applied intentionally, as by a government, the corruption of language may be used to oppress an entire set of people. The importance of mechanics and grammar becomes especially apparent, since one of the prime principles of Newspeak is to eliminate synonyms, antonyms, and adjectives; Newspeak wishes to abolish any uncertainty in language, leaving only simple, black-and-white dichotomies. The simplistic worldview this sort of speech would impress is the worldview which the Party wishes to create: one of happiness and sadness, good and bad, where no grey areas of thought and action can even be conceived of. The idea of adjectives particularly is abhorrent to the proponents of Newspeak, as they lend more shades of meaning to words than is deemed necessary. Syme, the most ardent follower of Newspeak in the novel, glorifies Newspeak as "orthodoxy." "Orthodoxy means not thinking," he claims, "not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconconsciousness" (Orwell 53). In this scene, then, is the baseline theory of Newspeak laid out: if a concept cannot be spoken, eventually it will become impossible to think it. This theory forms the basis of Big Brother's

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