“Newspeak, ” the “official language of Oceania” in the novel 1984, comes from “new speak” and was created to supersede “Oldspeak, ” or Standard English. Newspeak isn’t just buzzwords, but the deliberate replacement of one set of words in the language for another. Its transition, expected to be completed “by about the year 2050, ” appears not through history or social change, but through the will of the Party. The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but also to make all other modes of thought impossible.

Orwell discusses the “perfected” form of Newspeak, with grammatical “peculiarities, ” such as “an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech.” Its vocabulary is divided into the A, B, and C classes. The A class contains “everyday life” words mutated with prefixes and intensifiers like “uncold, ” “pluscold, ” and “doublepluscold.” The B class contains doublethink coinages like “joycamp” and “Minipax, ” similar to “the characteristic features of political language (…) in totalitarian countries.” The citizens of Oceania must have “an outlook” shaped by these restricted words; even sexual life was regulated by “sexcrime” and “goodsex.”

The C class “consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms, ” defined rigidly and stripped of meanings. There was no vocabulary for science as a habit of mind; any meaning it could bear was “already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.” This linguistic control made translating the past nearly impossible. “All mans are equal” could exist only as “a palpable untruth, ” and Jefferson’s preamble could only be swallowed by the single word “crimethink.”

The phrase “alternative facts” could fit easily into the “Newspeak Dictionary, ” showing how such language can sink into discourse and become Newspeak itself.

Josh Jones. George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works,

the Official Language of His Totalitarian Dystopia in 1984.

January 25th,2017. Internet:https://www.openculture.com> (adapted).