Newspeak

The satirical dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’’ by George Orwell was composed to express what life would be like in London if under totalitarian rule. One controlling method is to obliterate ‘Oldspeak’ and in place use ‘Newspeak’ in order to control the country. Newspeak is the official subliminal language of Oceania and is based on the principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak has three different classes and is used to control and manipulate the population of Oceania to make them passive and oblivious to what the government is actually doing, but more importantly to ensure they cannot oppose the government or commit Doublethink or Crimethink. The government has implored a range of methods to do this, but the language of Newspeak is the most effective.
By using Newspeak the Party predominates the population’s minds. They do this by ‘…cutting the language down to the bone’ and to ‘…narrow the range of thought…’. An example of this is the word ‘free’, which is part of Newspeak, but under no circumstances can it ever be used politically or in reference to freedom, because ‘…the concept of freedom has been abolished’. The concept of freedom carries connotations of happiness and individuality yet Newspeak literally nullifies the existence of these chattels. Without a word to express freedom, people cannot grasp the concept of what it is. The language eliminates undesirable words, or more simply words the government does not want. This suggests that citizens range of alertness to the atrocities that the government is committing is slowly getting smaller because they will not have a name or word to put to them, this marks the pure corruption of the Party in order for them to stay in power. The government hopes to have the country of Oceania ...

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...dead’ because it is an inescapable fate. This runs true with Winston as he admits that ‘he loved Big Brother’ and that two and two makes five after being vaporised and subsequently transformed.
To conclude, the sole purpose that Newspeak has been created is to control the minds of the population, which Orwell does not approve of. There are crimes that are called Crimethink and Doublethink in Newspeak and are essentially the act of thinking for yourself and therefore realising what the Party is doing and therefore contradicting them. The only way for the Party to stay in power is to keep the population brainwashed and manipulated into thinking that what the Party is doing by its citizens is the right thing by not providing words to express the wrong things that they are doing. Newspeak is the most effective way of controlling the population by a corrupted government.