Newspeak, the Linguistic Monster in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty‐Four

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is his most important work, one which also enjoys undiminished popularity and political relevance. This dystopia, which is a novel of ideas, is populated with monsters, the proponents of the tyrannical regime of Oceania, who aimed at absolute control not only of people’s bodies, but also of their minds, mainly through the ‘rationalized’ artificial language called Newspeak, which was meant to make all other forms of thought impossible. The importance of Newspeak in the construction of the argument of this novel is not only literary, but also linguistic; thus, Nineteen Eighty-Four is also considered Orwell’s chief work of linguistics, one which has had lexicological effects in inspiring a host of further creations including doublespeak, teenspeak and nukespeak, besides the popularization of several slogans, including ‘Big Brother is watching you’. In fact, language was one of Orwell’s major concerns. This paper argues that from a linguistic viewpoint Newspeak is a monster in itself, completely frozen as it is, immune to change and other semantic processes, thus going against the principles on which any natural language is based.