Nineteen Eighty-Four, a glimpse at a dystopian future, but more importantly, a possible future. Winston, who lives in London, Oceania, is the protagonist in the story who lives under the marxist/totalitarian state with the rest of the community. The state upholds marxist trends of categorising and controlling the people. The author George Orwell writes this text as a warning to the people, to show them what the world could end up like if they don’t do anything to stop it. The book was written in 1948 and as is about what times could be like in 1984, hence the title. He portrays things that the people of his time fear, all means of control, and lack of privacy. “In the book, ‘Newspeak’ is a language the community is adopting. It was set in place by the party as one of these means of control. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”. In this instance by controlling thought, the party can control actions. Newspeak is pretty much just the english language, but many words are discontinued and and some new, less emotive ones added in. “Desire was thoughtcrime”, thoughtcrime is when an individual thinks wrongly toward the party/state, it is said here to be caused by desire, desire to make those thoughts a reality, Newspeak eradicates this possibility. I will be exploring the Newspeak language by looking at its grammar through regularity and interchangeability, and the A, B and C vocabularies that build it up.

Grammar in Newspeak plays a large part in its differences from Oldspeak. It is the foundation of building the language up, and is just as important, if not more, than grammar in normal english. There are two main concepts that make up the basis of Newspeak. Interchangeability, and regularity. Interchangeability means that the similar base words can be used in different parts of speech, any one word can be used as a noun, verb, adjective or adverb. For example, ‘thought’ is not a word and is replaced by ‘think’ in all cases and tenses. This is a noun being replaced by a more simple verb-noun, but this isn’t always the case. ‘Cut’ has been taken out and replaced by ‘knife’. This is a verb-noun being replaced by a verb-noun. So there is not really a principle in which words get chosen to stay and which are subdued, the purpose is to minimise range of vocabulary, so how the party does it is not of importance as long as the language is dulled. Adjectives and adverbs are made by adding suffixes and affixes to existing words in the Newspeak language, e.g adding -ful to a word would make it an adjective, or adding -wise to the end of a word like good would make it the adverb ‘goodwise’.

Regularity in Newspeak reinforces a theme of using base words, instead of changing a word completely for a past participle (such as run to ran), an -ed would be used instead (run to runned). The same concept is used for plurals, -s or -es is used instead of using a different word (instead of man to men it is man to mans). This greatly decreased the amount of words one could use. “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The eleventh edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050”

This eradication of variety of grammar use in their language is a good way of warning the readers about how bad the future could be. When it is used in the book it makes society seem so much more dull and less expressive, very different from what would be used at the authors time in 1948. 12 years after then the Freedom of Speech movement begun, this may not have been influenced by George Orwell, but ‘the people’ seemed to make a move for there own well being, against that of what a dystopian future could hold. “The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” Once the language is finalised and being used by everyone, the party’s goal will be reached, controlling the masses.

The Newspeak language consists of three main vocabularies, A, B and C. The A vocabulary has regularly used, simple words from Oldspeak that are modified to reduce emotive range, they are used to construct normal sentences. B is words derived from Oldspeak but usually joined with another word to make one of political use. C is words made up by the party for someones specific job. Words from the A vocabulary are like what was listed above in the rules of grammar in Newspeak. Words from B would be the likes of ‘crimethink’ or ‘thinkpol’ (thats thoughtcrime or thought police in Oldspeak). C words are words that would not be recognised when looked at without prior knowledge, they are purely scientific and technical and look like a line of coding. All three of these vocabularies restrict the free thought of an individual. The A vocabulary significantly reduces range of word use. The B vocabulary make technical words seem more exclusive and powerful. personally when I read words from B, I get a sense of an authoritative figure, who created and uses these words, holding power over me. The C words hold a solid link to marxism or communism, they are effective in the workplace and keep people from distraction through emotive thought. That way they can be controlled to do exactly what the state wants them to do, after someone can be controlled like this in one place, it can happen in others and eventually all general life. This is the party’s way of inducing ‘reality control’, “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.” It was a way of keeping the population controlled by fear and Newspeak was a great enabler to this concept.

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.”

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

To me, George Orwell’s attempt at warning the people of his time was successfully delivered, but possible not acted on as heavily as needed by the masses. The year 1984 passed and not much of the stuff portrayed in the book had happened, some things were recognisable, but not on an extreme level. The world may still be heading in this direction just on a slower pace. The techniques he used to convey this message to the readers worked how I think he wanted them too and the book almost scares the message into the readers. But before we know it, maybe that dystopian future could become a reality.