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1984 Newspeak Language Analysis

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Recommended: George orwell 1984 on free speech

Delving Deeper into the Control of Big Brother
Imagine tasting an extremely delicious treat and not being able to come up with the perfect word to describe it, because the only available words are “good” “plusgood” and “doubleplusgood.” This is the goal Oceania is aiming for by 2050 with their official language, Newspeak. By then Old Speak (Standard English) will vanish and Newspeak will take its place to “meet the ideological needs of Ingnos, or English Socialism” (Orwell 299). Newspeak can be categorized into three sections: A vocabulary, B vocabulary, and C vocabulary. Each vocabulary is responsible for removing words that are deemed “unorthodox” or go against the views of Oceania. Its purpose is to remove all “thoughtcrime” and leave room for only “goodthink.” When Newspeak comes into full …show more content…

People will be unable to translate Oldspeak causing "the last link with the past" (Orwell 311) to be erased. Newspapers, books, or journals containing Oldspeak will not be understandable, making each material useless. For example, the Declaration of Independence will be impossible to translate into Newspeak while maintaining its original meaning of equality. The passage will merely be translated into a single word, crimethink. Words contained in Oldspeak like “honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science and religion” (page 305) that express significant concepts will be nonexistent. People will not be able to protest an unfair regulation or act because there will be no words to defend their detest or issue. Without the ability to read Oldspeak, nobody will be able to know how the past was and hold the belief that it was always like this. This will allow Big Brother to finally have complete control of the past, present, and future without any barriers in the

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Imagine coming home to a family that has to use a dictionary in order to speak. A family so worried, that they quit their jobs, in order to lessen the chance o accidentally slipping and saying a censored letter. Mark Dunn wrote a novel to explore how people would react when being censored, and the results caused a considerable amount of consternation in people. Censorship on language caused people to have lipograms forced on to their tongues, these rules brought out the worst of people, and even the government wasn't able to conform to these silly rules. Censorship causes unusual dialect in people.

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Syme uncovers a few of his own opinions on word reduction when he claims to Winston “In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning” (1). Syme’s interest in word reduction grows great enough that he goes into a personal route with Winston. Winston, since his birth, speaks Oldspeak and only Oldspeak. Syme calls out Winston’s routine from childhood with the words “vagueness” and “useless”. Syme’s love for word reduction leads to mockery which after all, tends to anger some individuals and cause them to lash out.

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Known as Newspeak, it is used to reinforce a dumbed down civilization. The Ingsoc Party’s pared-down version of the English

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This example explains the goals of Newspeak as a whole. Even in the future of the party the slogans and news will change to where only a few words will be needed to explain anything. This next quote goes in deeper about how old speak will in longer exist in the future. “"By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed.

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Through the forms of manipulation and modernization, the Party manages to ensure and ascertain control, especially involving technology. Oceanians cannot expect privacy due to the Party’s use of advanced surveillance by placing telescreens and covert microphones all across Oceania. The image and slogan, “… BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” is a constant reminder that the citizens of Oceania are being observed and their actions can be potentially exposed following penalizing actions (pg.2). With Big Brother’s face publicized on posters, telescreens and even coins, it often becomes difficult for citizens to dissent the rules of the Party as most are soon willing to believe what the Party informs them. Oceanians are used to living in a constant state of supervision with invasive machinery, which is so advanced that even the “smallest” sign of “abnormality” “could give you away” (pg.62).

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A plan to take your freedom. Freedom of speech, identity, and thoughts. They wanted as much power over Oceania as they could. One of their many devious techniques is Newspeak. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought”(50)

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The government has made it so that people cannot say words that would make them look bad, the people of Oceania cannot even say words like “bad”, but instead they have to say “ungood”. They have made it so that the people of Oceania are so brainwashed, that they will believe anything that the government tells them to believe. The language that is used in Oceania has been watered down so that the words that can be used are few and simple. It is so controlled that the people of Oceania only have enough words so that they can go on with everyday life, but not exceed the limit implemented by Big Brother. “There is no opportunity-- no space-- left by such words for thinking around or beyond objects they refer to..”

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Imagine your TV is always on and always watching your every move. Welcome to 1984. From now on you must be very careful what you think for you must always live in fear of committing a thought crime. Even one negative thought about Big Brother could force the Thought Police to erase you from existence or, as they say in Newspeak, to make you an unperson. This is the daily life of a citizen of George Orwell’s fictional country called Oceania.

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He is making an effort for Winston to believe in the beauty of destroying language by claiming the future is better off without Oldspeak. Therefore, it should be removed from

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Newspeak is a major part of how Big Brother controls the people in 1984 because Newspeak is the way to keep creativity to a minimum, to limit the knowledge of the people, and to eliminate the ways people can speak out about Big Brother. Newspeak contrives to consistently revive Doublethink or the action of believing two completely different and contradictory ideas at once in order to control the brain of its speakers. Newspeak is destructive in nature because of its destruction words that are “useless,” but all words have a specific meaning even if their definition is close to another word. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can

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To illustrate, the book discusses how the government utilizes mind control methods such as providing an alternative definition to words. “All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’” (18). Providing an alternative meaning of words can misconstrue them in the favor of Big Brother. Likewise, the United States has emulated “doublethink” when it presents itself as convenient.

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The party believe that destroying words will inevitably prevent power from slipping through their fingers. Values such as ‘honour, integrity, morality, etc’ cease to exist. In chapter five, Syme explains to Winston, “We’re cutting the language down to the bone. Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year”. Through this quote, it is easy to interpret that ‘Newspeak’ is merely used to restrict the freedom of expression.

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Manipulation of language is one of the themes of George Orwell's 1984. Language manipulation was one of the many ways the Inner Party controlled the population. The Ministry of Truth did this by creating a new language, Newspeak. This language was constructed to have no words for any unorthodox thoughts. Some of which are: that the government is bad, things could be better, or even life could be lived differently.

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This is particularly evident in the story when the character Syme is tasked with creating a new version of the Newspeak dictionary and one day informs Winston of the fact that “Newspeak is the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller every year” (Orwell 52). This information exaggerates the slow process of language devolution and helps to enlighten unaware readers of the detrimental changes taking

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Each part of everyone’s day is planned out and strictly enforced, from the morning exercises, to meals, to work, to sleep. Any form of expression is forbidden, and Winston’s decisions to both write his thoughts down in a diary and to have a relationship with Julia is both punishable by death. The government is attempting to control people through words. They edit out words in the dictionary, leaving people no ways of even expressing or describing certain things because those words no longer exist. The newly implemented language, Newspeak, is a form of English that the book’s totalitarian government utilizes to discourage freethinking.

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