Newspeak

"Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc."

Newspeak is a fictive language invented by George Orwell for the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and the inhabitants of Oceania were 'encouraged' to think and converse in Newspeak.

The goal of Newspeak was essentially the reduction of vocabulary and destruction of words, especially synonyms and antonyms, and to render language instinctively euphemistic (if "good" already exists then "bad" will be abolished, instead replaced by "ungood"), so as to suppress any possibility of expressing rebellious thoughts against the party in the form of words. Based on the rules of Basic English and the (now discredited) strong form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the weak form is also controversial), it was intended to be a psychological and linguistic Restraining Bolt on the population of Oceania. Its construction is similar to Esperanto (Ungood/Malbona) and other compounding languages (such as German). Contraction conventions from historical totalitarian regimes were also incorporated, resulting in words like "Ingsoc" which are similar in construction to "Comintern", "Nazi" and "Gestapo". Acronyms are used extensively. The Party predicted (or propagandized) that Newspeak would completely supplant English by 2050. Every edition of the Newspeak Dictionary was smaller than its predecessor.

Orwell provided an appendix discussing the features of the language in the novel.

As noted above, many features of Newspeak are in fact similar to the features of real life compounding languages, including German and Russian, but also many Native American languages. This gave Newspeak a certain "totalitarian flavor" at a time when both Germany and Russia had totalitarian governments. This point may be lost today, if only due to the popularity of the phenomenon, the theory that there is a connection between language and social behavior being mostly discredited (after all, people can go through many different governments, totalitarian or not, without changing their language). Also, this makes Newspeak especially difficult to portray in a translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four into a language that is already agglutinative. If the word for "bad" in your native language is already something like "ungood", translators will have a hard time coming up with a Newspeak version of it.

Strictly speaking, neither German nor Russian is an agglutinative language. The difference between them and English is one of spelling, that in German a compound is written as one word ("Physiklehrer") while in English it is written as two ("physics teacher"). Russian in fact often will use a combination of "(noun-derived) adjective + noun" where German and English use "noun + noun" compounds. The feature that Orwell imitated in Newspeak was a way of combining clipped elements of different words into one, because that became very pronounced in the language used by the Nazi and Soviet Communist regimes. However, linguistically speaking they are not that different from Portmanteau words (e. g. "brunch") or acronyms pronounced as words (e. g. "radar", "laser") and such constructions were freely, if less frequently, used before, after and apart from the two totalitarian regimes.

"Newspeak Truspoke (introduced distinctive new terms in the English lexicon, including):"


 * Big Brother Is Watching
 * Thoughtcrime
 * Unperson
 * Thought Police
 * Doublethink

Neologisms that are based on Newspeak syntax but not coined by Orwell have also appeared, the most notable being groupthink (describing a group thought process where everybody is going along with everybody else and no one is thinking rationally). Frighteningly often such words are coined in political/media circles (and the Internet). For instance, Double-Speak has retained its Orwellian connotations, even though he never said it.

Some Orwellian phrases have been replaced by modern equivalents; bellyfeel never caught on, despite the usefulness of a word to describe "that which is calculated to give a positive gut reaction", possibly because it sounds childish and begs to be used literally. The appearance of truthiness, which contains the same meaning (that Orwell intended, not Ingsoc) and mouthfeel which does literally mean "how a piece of food feels in the diner's mouth" in the past decade have probably ended bellyfeel's chances.

Of course, unlike Lewis Carroll, Orwell was not actually trying to popularize an approach to the English Language.

"See also:"


 * Conspiracy Tropes
 * Dystopia Tropes
 * Oppression Tropes


 * Orwellian
 * 1984

"Newspeak thoughtmade the following tropes:"


 * Airstrip One
 * BiCapitalization
 * Language Equals Thought
 * People's Republic of Tyranny
 * Super Fun Happy Thing of Doom: All the Ministries are an example.
 * We Will Use Wiki Words in the Future: we do.

"Otherspeak (Other Orwell-inspired tropes):"


 * Room 101
 * Orwellian Retcon
 * Orwellian Editor
 * Two Plus Torture = Five
 * Written by the Winners

Newspeak Examplestrope (contains examples of):

 * Internal Retcon
 * Perfectly Cromulent Word
 * Portmanteau
 * Strange Syntax Speaker (Newspeak is a specific instance of this trope)
 * Unusual Euphemism (Thoughtcrime, Goodsex [sex between married Party members, without enjoyment on the woman's side, also known as "Duty To The State"], Joycamps [forced labor camps]).
 * Minitru (Ministry of Truth) is concerned with propaganda and historical revisionism.
 * Minipax (Ministry of Peace) conducts war.
 * Miniluv (Ministry of Love) instills fear in the populace.
 * Miniplenty/Miniprod (Ministry of Plenty) keeps the population in a state of starvation.
 * This was slightly different, as they actually published their 'War is Peace' redefinitions for the ministries, making it more Personal Dictionary. The point of Newspeak was to change English so much they wouldn't need to anymore, because people wouldn't be able to conceive of it any other way.
 * The word "newspeak", or rather "nowomowa" entered the Polish language as a description of any political duckspeak by a prominent person. The novel was, of course, banned in Poland. It is seldom used today, unless referring to Communist speeches and the like. Which is odd if you think about it.

Meta

 * A reason you Never Say "Die" in fiction.

Literature

 * Nineteen Eighty-Four (Well du'h)
 * Anthony Burgess plays with this as "Worker's English" (or WE) in his novel, 1985, written as a response to Orwell.
 * Ayn Rand's novella Anthem depicts a stagnant, collectivist future in which words like "I," "Me," "Mine," have been eliminated in favor of "We", "Us," and "Our." He/She has become "They." Other words have been eliminated as well, which the main character rediscovers from ancient texts. Rand's use of the basic concept even predates Orwell.
 * Ironically, the singular they has a long and proud history, according to those ancient texts.
 * Also interestingly the main protagonist is called Equality 7-2521, the numbers being a common fear of a 'loss of identity' to the collective group. But when you think about it, the transhumanist philosopher FM-2030 makes a compelling argument than any other naming convention stems from collectivism itself, as you do not choose your own name and it will have very specific parameters - your name being grounded on your gender, your ethnicity, nationality, or even just something your parents were fond of - while a numbering convention would make sure that you are the only individual with such a name.
 * This Perfect Day has language changed to make words like "fight" and "hate" be considered horrible cusswords, in hopes that the concepts would become anathema, if not exactly unthinkable. After all, if you don't know what hate and violence are, you can't be happy that UNICOMP keeps you free from them, can you?
 * The society in The Giver enforced what it called "precision of language." Children are strongly reprimanded for using any kind of exaggeration or figurative language, because they lump it under "lying". (The example given is a child who says he is starving when he is only very hungry, because implying that the state would really let anyone starve is seen as extremely problematic.) They can still play pretend, though, so it doesn't hamper their thinking.
 * Additionally, due to the Giver system, a great deal of the very concepts of the old world (stavation, war, etc) have been or are in the process of being completely scrubbed out of the collective consciousness this way almost passively. Released to Elsewhere is a prime example: it is a Deadly Euphemism that nobody save the Giver even KNOWS is a euphemism because they have ceased to have virtually any concept of death. Which means that the authorities that order it and the doctors that perform it likely probably don't realize the full ramifications of what they are doing. In short: NewSpeak so powerful and entrenched that even those that mandate it and enforce don't really recognize it for what it is. Imagine the kind of psychological tampering THAT would require.
 * In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green-Sky Trilogy, all negative emotions are lumped under the heading of "troubled" or "unjoyfulness." (And displaying any sort of "unjoyfulness," or even feeling it in excess, is generally frowned upon.)

Live Action TV
""Mistress Beata invites you to witness this morning's reaffirmation of Angel One's moral imperative.""
 * The 4400. In one episode, when Tom and Diana are sent to see who is writing a pro-promicin blog, Diana comments that they aren't supposed to be the Thought Police.
 * Babylon 5: During President Clark's totalitarian regime, and also in a Flash Forward ("Reverse-Correct InfoSpeak" being used to describe Historical Revisionism; specifically revised bits of history are "Goodfacts" as opposed to "Realfacts").
 * M* A* S* H: Hawkeye is told that he is an "Unperson" when the Army mistakenly notifies his father of his "death."
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Angel One" where the aliens invite some of the Enterprise crew to an execution:

Toys

 * Treespeak from Bionicle uses a similar sort of syntax, with most terms being of the "adjective-noun" or "noun-verbing" varieties ("leaf-running", "bald-land", etc). The most common variant is to tack "ever-" on the front of words, as a form of emphasis, eg, "ever-forgotten"= "completely forgotten". "Quick-" is also commonly attached to verbs, eg "quick-think".

Video Games

 * Kingdom of Loathing features a ski slope graded as "XXX Double-Plus-Ungood".

Web Comics

 * Sinfest shows how this encourages the communication gap: Slick is unable to understand messages from "The Sisterhood" and she is unable to translate them from her strange dialect to colloquial English.

Web Original

 * Wikipedia. Some argue that this notable free encyclopedia spawned enough of Newspeak to qualify as a separate dialect. More research (not to be confused with Original Research) is needed to tell whether it is so.
 * More 1984-ian: badsite, wikilove, and now WikiCrime.
 * Speaking of which...
 * This very site.
 * More than one would think.
 * In particular, one of the goals of Newspeak was to replace colorful, evocative, varied expressions with boring, mechanical, precise ones. Many of the article title changes over the course of TV Tropes' history are disturbingly close to this ideal.
 * Many, many internet terms (aka netspeak or leetspeak). For example: Blog, Vlog, LOL, longphoto, "google" and "youtube" as verbs.

Western Animation
"Homer: "I want the whole package! Coffin, tombstone, and anti-stink spray!"
 * The Simpsons: In one of the Treehouse Of Horror specials, Homer's tampering with time creates an Orwellian Springfield with Ned Flanders as Big Brother: "Heidely-ho, slaverinos!" That's right. They Flanderized Newspeak.
 * The Simpsons also lampshaded the funeral industry's heavy system of euphemisms.

Funeral Director: "Actually, sir, we prefer the term 'casket' to 'coffin' and 'monument' to 'tombstone.' We have all the leading brands of anti-stink spray.""

Real Life

 * The Church of Happyology uses buttloads of Newspeak.
 * Maintenance Workers and Custodial Technicians.
 * A lot of technical jargon can sound like this, really
 * An example of an idiom and watchword made up, spread, used (up to UN Secretary General) and then thrown away and intensely displaced -- all in 42 days.