
They are Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty, as described by the narrator.ĭoublethink is one of the most essential Newspeak words in 1984. Their Newspeak abbreviations are some of the first Newspeak words that the reader is exposed to. The four ministries: The Ministry of Peace, The Ministry of Plenty, The Ministry of Truth, and The Ministry of Love, are introduced at the beginning of the novel. For example, “speedful” means fast or rapid.Įxamples of Newspeak in 1984 The Ministry Names For example, adjectives were created by adding “ful” to the end of terms. Words, Orwell noted, were also interchangeable. The alphabet was divided into different vocabularies, such as the “A” vocabulary that included words needed for “the business of everyday life.” This included words for eating, working, drinking, and riding in vehicles. Not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Frank speek free#
For example, “The dog is free from lice.” There is no secondary meaning, such as “intellectually free.”īelow are a few of the many Newspeak words Orwell invented. The word exists in Oceania but only in the context of something being “free” of trouble. The Party sought to eliminate undesirable words and strip those words of “all secondary meanings whatever.” Orwell cites “free” as a good example.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and 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. Orwell writes about Newspeak several times, stating that the language had a very specific purpose that complimented the use of doublethink. The other two are doublethink and the mutability (or changeability) of the past. It is one of the three tenants of INGSOC. Through the use of Newspeak, the Party is attempting to control what one is capable of thinking. It focuses on the ideology of INGSOC and the belief that the Party is all-knowing. These include expressions of personal identity, free will, or anything resembling a rebellion. It removes “subversive” concepts from the language that the Party wants its citizens to avoid. Newspeak is a controlled, simplified version of English. The development of the language, he continues on to say, was to make “all other modes of thought impossible.” In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. When writing about Newspeak, Orwell defined it in the appendix as: He also included an appendix at the back of 1984 that deals with the concepts of Newspeak. George Orwell wrote a great deal about language, including his essay “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946. Today, the term “Newspeak” is applied in contemporary life when someone tries to introduce a new word into the vocabulary, particularly when politicians do so. The term “Nazi” is a reduction of “nationalsozialist” and “Gestapo” is a reduction of “Geheime Staatspolizei.” These syllabic abbreviations come from a human willingness to make complicated things easier. When constructing this language, Orwell was influenced by real-life examples in Germany and Russia. The language reduces words to syllables and combines them together to create new, unusual words.

There are various iterations of the Newspeak dictionary, and one of Winston Smith’s associates, Syme, is working on the text. It is a language that is still under construction as the novel’s plot is playing out. They believe if they can rid the English language of troubling words, then there will be no way that anyone can conceive of the concepts without them. The purpose of the language is to reduce “unnecessary” words and those that might lead the citizens of Oceania into thought patterns the Party wants to avoid.
