B.B. Dayorder: Know Your Language; The Principles of Newspeak

"The destruction of language is a beautiful thing."

Newspeak is the official language of Oceania and has been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In 1984 there is not as yet anyone who uses Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. It is expected that Newspeak will finally supersede Oldspeak (or Standard English) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gains ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech.

It is intended that when Newspeak has been adopted once and for all and the Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary is so constructed (limited) as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This is accomplished by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as "This dog is free from lice" or "this field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free", since political and intellectual freedom no longer exist even as concepts. and are therefore of necessity nameless.

A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of "politically equal", or that free had once meant "intellectually free", than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook....

Winston's friend (actually comrade, people don't have friends these days), Syme, works in the RESEARCH DEPARTMENT of the Ministry of Truth. Syme, a specialist in Newspeak, was one of the enormous team of experts engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary....

"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition," said Syme. "We're getting the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. You think 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. We're cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. The great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well...In the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. The whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality, only one word.

"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. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak."

Long Live Big Brother!