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 For Orwell, English had begun to suffer from outdated form, stale or unclear (and therefore meaningless) metaphors, and pretentious diction.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 aimspunish a person for saying the word "free" long enough, and it will sink in. Erase the word "free" from the language, and eventually it will be erased from the mind.
The grammar and vocabulary of Newspeak are of particular interest, as they are chiefly made up of terms relating to politics. Examples include "crimethink" (illegal thoughts) and "Ingsoc" (English Socialism). Party members refer to fabricated words like these as "duckspeak"the speaker quacks out slogans and catchphrases in short, staccato bursts. Interestingly, duckspeak can be a good or an ungood thing; if one is "quacking" out the ideals of Big Brother, the duckspeaker is admired. The created grammar of Newspeak consists of adding simple modifiers to the most basic of words, such as "ungood" and "doubleplusungood" for bad and extremely bad. If there is a word like "ungood," Syme notes, there is no reason for a word like "bad." In this way the Party aims to dumb down language enough that only the most fundamental concepts still exist. The Newspeak concept of "doublethink" is perhaps the most deep-rooted and telling aspect of Orwell's English Socialist tongue. Doublethink and doubletalk consist of maintaining two diametrically opposite beliefs at the same time. These concepts are illustrated vividly by Winston's job as a rewriter of history. The Party's use of the print, radio, and visual media serve as "reality control"so the slogan runs, "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past." Winston, as a rational human being (with common sense being the greatest crime in Oceania), knows that the past cannot actually be altered, yet his job is to do just that. Every week, it seems to him, a news story appears which contradicts another story in his memory. He creates and erases people and histories for the media, in order to fashion the past as the Party officials see fit. In this way Big Brother seeks to control not just the body of his subjects, but their minds as well. In a stunning act of astuteness, Big Brother knows that the memory is not to be trusted, indeed that it can be changed easily to fit whatever politics are needed that day. The instances of "war" and "peace" with Eurasia and Eastasia and the interchangeability of those two countries are evidence enough that people will believe what they are told when it appears in an official manner, and when there is no hard evidence to the contrary. The idea of the "memory hole" is frighteningly plausible, and, as Winston sees it, "more terrifying than mere torture and death" (34). Winston understands that if the only evidence is your own memory, that is no evidence at all under a system which annihilates anyone who dares to think and remember. When an untruth goes unchallenged and passes into history, it becomes truth. Even Winston's memories are unreliablehe cannot recall the time when Britain was free, though he knows it must have existed, and he cannot bring to mind any scenes of his childhood. The world he lives in no longer contains the vocabulary for the world that was, and this lack slowly destroys Winston's recollection of his own life. If, for whatever reason, a person or event begins to be considered "unfit" then it is "vaporized" and thus never existed. In the world of Airstrip One, Big Brother has already oneand from the very get-go, Winston knows this. He acknowledges that the world he lives in is one of solitude, which means that no one who attemps to think independently will succeed. The Party's ability to instill fear and its methods for doing so are unfathomably perfect; the constant uncertainty of whether one is being watched combined with perpetual filth, hunger, and discomfort produces first the desire to do what one is told, and later the instinct to obey. This is psychological manipulation on a massive scale. Doublethink emerges in nearly every Airstrip One citizen as a consequence of the Party's assault on their mindsthe capacity for individual, independent mental processes is being systematically eradicated. Rebellion was being made literally "unthinkable." To change the way people think: O'Brien admits that this is the aim of everything which the Party carries out in Big Brother's name; torture and Room 101 are employed not to draw out confessions of crimes, but to forcibly change the way a person views and thinks about the world.
Purposefully, it seems, Orwell created Newspeak to embody all that he found wrong with the English tongue as it stood in his time. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell writes strongly against dead metaphors and cliches, which he said "think your thoughts for you." He also disdained political euphemism and useless abstractions, both of which run rampant in Big Brother's Newspeak. Erich Fromm's afterword stresses the importance of not reading 1984 as a simple portrayal of Stalinist totalitarianism, but rather as a possible future for any society and an illustration of certain elements of our society todayand the use of Newspeak is not limited to Orwell's dystopia. Aspects of Newspeak are evident in American culture, particularly the arenas of domestic and global politics. Orwell would have shuddered at the words being bandied about on US airwaves and in American newspapers: the abuse and denigration of meaning of terms like "liberal" and "conservative," the incessant political correctness which leads to meaningless euphemism, and the glorification of shamelessly slanted vocabulary. America is the "homeland" now, not a nation; someone who commits a suicide bomb attack can be a terrorist or a freedom fighter, depending on where you stand; a civilian killed in China by the Chinese government is a "citizen casualty," while the same civilian killed by American forces would be classified as "collateral damage." In their reliance on tweaking the emotions of citizens, the American government and media's use of language is frighteningly close to Big Brother's.