by Cole Nelson

Created on: November 26, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

"'Oh that,' I said, 'is what we call nadsat talk. All the teens use that, sir'" Alex (Burgess, A Clockwork Orange 167).
Throughout Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange, the main character and his "droogs" speak in a new and entirely unheard of dialect (as of 1962, when the book was published). This dialect was created especially for the book itself in what Burgess called an "exercise in linguistic programming" (Burgess 38), and it was later popularized by Stanley Kubrik's film interpretation of the book. What makes Nadsat so interesting is that it is still a recognizable form of English, not an entirely new language. Such examples of entirely invented languages may be found in books such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, or even in video games, such as Final Fantasy X's Al Bhed language. Nadsat, however, is more reminiscent of George Orwell's Newspeak from 1984. This essay will be an investigation of Nadsat's lexicon and morphology. It will also examine Nadsat's history, construction, and use of cockney (rhyming slang) in an effort to show that it is both similar to and different enough from English to be a dialect of its own. Above all, I would like to show that Nadsat could conceivably still grow and be used; that its construction allows for it to be expanded upon, making it a viable English dialect. It may be practical to have Stanley Edgar Hyman's A Nadsat Glossary (printed in the 1963 edition of A Clockwork Orange) near at hand for quick referencing.

In his autobiography, Anthony Burgess relates that Nadsat developed as a result of a number of factors. First and foremost was a group of British teens in the late 1950's called the Edwardian Strutters. "These were youths dressed very smartly in neo-Edwardian suits with heavy soled boots and distinctive coiffures" (26). The British teens, who were prone to violence, inspired not only the look and behavior of the main character, Alex, but they later gave Burgess a blueprint by which he constructed Nadsat. He knew that charactars' manner of speaking would have to match their exterior to be believable, and after trying to impose the slang of the 1960's on his novel, he scrapped it and decided to invent his own. "The story had to be told by a young thug of the future, and it had to be told in his own version of English. [] It was pointless to write the book in the slang of the early sixties: it was ephemeral like all slang and might have a lavender smell by the time the manuscript got to the

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