Use Of Language In George Orwell's '1984'

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Language is a kind of solipsism. For Wittenburg and Whorf, a language is a “house of... consciousness”1 from which the external world is encoded and assimilated through the frosted, distorted glass of its windows. It is a culturally relative concept, encoding the collective ideas of justice, history, religion and identity of the native speakers which are then projected on to the world. Thus by imposing a language, one imposes and limits a mode of thought. Orwell's Newspeak in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, illustrates the attempt to recreate what Marx would dub 'the language of real life'2. The 'philologist' Syme, busying himself with the “destruction of words”3 may well consider himself the destroyer of worlds as he linguistically dismantles unorthodox thought and creates Ingsoc's totalitarian reality. …show more content…
This can be compared with the early 17th century conception of language, in which thinkers and writers of the time aimed to remove double meanings and interpretations, tightly binding the sign and the signified. Starting from the premise that language creates thought, the totalitarian regime of Ingsoc requires Newspeak as the sole medium of expression as it completely denies any plurality of meaning. Any mode of thought, apart from Big Brothers, is negated. It attempts to make “heretical thought... literally unthinkable”4 through is severely paring down the vocabulary, providing an appropriate linguistic channel for “the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc”5. Newspeak is defined by the strictly prosaic systematisation of language; for example, it removes synonyms and antonyms in order to create an entirely binary code. Bad becomes 'ungood'. Dark is replaced by 'unlight'. Adjectival meaning is formed by adding the suffix 'ful' – 'speedful'. Variety and nuanced are entirely removed from the language, so in theory these qualities can be removed from thought
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