Newspeak
| Newspeak | |
| Spoken in: | Oceania |
| Timeline/Universe: | 1984 |
| Total speakers: | Unknown / unrevealed. |
| Genealogical classification: | A posteriori
|
| Basic word order: | SVO |
| Morphological type: | inflectional, prepositional |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | accusative |
| Created by: | |
| George Orwell | 1948 |
You think that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. The result of this politically motivated destruction of words, and the ideas behind them, is Newspeak, the constructed language used within the fictional dystopian culture of the super-state "Oceania" in George Orwell's 1984. More than a language, it is an entirely planned and guided way of thinking and understanding the world in a politically orthodox way that not only manipulates and guides the ruling class in proper ways of thinking but also prevents them from even conceiving of politically unorthodox ideas.
Description
Newspeak is the constructed langauge intended for use by Party members (the ruling class who fully engage in the philosophy and politics of Ingsoc). At one and the same time, it is both a means of communicating ideas and a means by which ideas are eradicated and made to unexist. In its basic form, Newspeak is an intentionally evolved form of Standard British English (which in culture is refered to as Oldspeak). The basic design principle of Newspeak is reductionism -- new words for new ideas are not created. On the contrary, old words for politically incorrect ideas, such as "freedom" and "liberty", when they refer to any political or philosophical notion, are either eradicated from the lexicon or else their meanings are reduced to simplest terms. For example, the word "free" in English can range semantically from "costs nothing" to "not infested by" to "enjoy liberty of thought and exercise of opinion". In Newspeak, the word "free" has been purified of its politically incorrect meanings; so "I am free" is a perfectly good Newspeak sentence, but any Newspeak speaker would rightly assume that you are not being infested by fleas or similar.
Newspeak consists of three kinds or domains of vocabulary: A, B and C. A words are common words that everyone uses on a daily basis. Words involving basic actions, things, places and politically neutral ideas (colors, relative velocity of the tube, etc) are all A words. The meanings and usages of most A words remain unchanged. The process of reduction, though, has caused many ordinary English words to disappear from the Newspeak lexicon. B words are the politically and intellectually charged words. These are words that involve concepts that impinge on the Party's way of life -- Ingsoc (English Socialism) or words upon which the Party wished to impart a particular spin. These words have suffered the greatest changes at the hands of the Party's conlangers. Meanings are often comppletely reversed or severely altered to suit the aims of the Party and of Ingsoc. Other words are simply eradicated when they do not serve the aims of the State. Or when they might serve to undermine the political stability of the Party, or when they might allow an individual to express ideas contrary to those allowed by the State. C words comprise special lists of technical and scientific terms.
Speakers and Distribution
The culture of Oceania is divided into two castes. Party members (who themselves are divided into Inner and Outer Party members) are those people who make up the ruling class of Oceanic society. Inner Party members are those who participate in organising and ruling society; Outer Party members are those involved in the lower levels of the burocracy. Proles form the unthinking, unimportant bulk of society; they are the ruled majority. Newspeak is primarily the language of Party members, though some words filter down into the common language of all Oceanic people. It is not clearly stated in the novel, but Newspeak must be widely spoken by only perhaps ten to twenty percent of the population at the outside. It is not revealed what the population of Oceania is, but is probably some three or four hundred millions.
Oceania is said to comprise the former British Empire (apparently less India) and the Americas and some parts of Africa. It is not clear whether Newspeak is the language of all Party members in all these places, some of which do not natively speak English, or whether there is a "Spanish Newspeak" as well as a "Portuguese Newspeak" and perhaps even a "French Newspeak".
Design Principles
Newspeak is a "reduced langauge", which means that words, and the potentially unorthodox meanings they carry, are intentionally eradicated from the language. Also, words thought to be superfluous to orthodox communication are eradicated. This process of reduction eradicates one or other of many adjective pairs: no good / bad, the negative of which is supplied by prefixing un- to the other. So, good / ungood. Nouns and verbs are used interchangeably (just as they often are in modern English); and any different forms are reduced to a single form. Thus, there is no Newspeak word "cut", knife serving for both the noun and verb; also, pairs like thought / think are reduced to simply think. Adjectives can be made from substantives by suffixing -ful and adverbs by suffixing -wise: speedful = fast; speedwise = quickly. Any irregular word was replaced by a regular form: well becomes goodwise. Negation is shown by prefixing un- and emphasis by prefixing plus-: uncold = warm; plusgood = excellent. Other prefixes like ante-, post-, up-, down- etc can be added to any noun or verb to alter the basic meaning of the word and thus reducing the number of dinstinct words.
All verbs and nouns are regular. Lives (n.) becomes lifes, men becomes mans, took becomes taked, good / better / best becomes good / gooder / goodest, though of course, one could also say good / plusgood / doubleplusgood, though these are really emphatics rather than true comparison. Only pronouns and auxiliary verbs were left to inflect irregularly. Will / shall was replaced by a single form, will.
Sometimes extra letters are added for purposes of euphony.
Text Sample
War is Peace -- in Oldspeak, this would be seen as an oxymoron; in Newspeak, this is a fundamental truth of existence. It is only by balancing a perpetual state of war between the three super-states of the world that peace can exist between these states. None of them can ever get the upper hand, and therefore win the war, and therefore upset the balance of the ruling Parties. Thus, by waging a continual war in which unimportant territories inhabited by irrelevant people are constantly sacrificed, the peace inflicted by the State is maintained and perpetuated.
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling -- could be rendered as "The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to nonexistent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing."
Corpus
Newspeak is enshrined in a few longer text samples, such as the above, plus a number of isolated uses of words scattered throughout the novel, such as "doubleplusungood" and "crimethinkful". Within the culture, much of the work of these state conlangers involved translating the literature of previous ages into Newspeak, a process that involves ideological transformation as much as fitting ideas to new words. Thus, not all old literature can be rendered into Newspeak. Unorthodox ideas simply can not be expressed in the language. Even if the words themselves are the same in both Oldspeak and Newspeak, such as "all men are created equal", the ideas behind the original can not be rendered into the target language. This sentence can only mean something like "all people have exactly the same attributes of size, height, etc." The notions of political equality and so forth can only be translated by the single word crimethink.
