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HandWiki. Unperson. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35946 (accessed on 04 October 2026).
HandWiki. Unperson. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35946. Accessed October 04, 2026.
HandWiki. "Unperson" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35946 (accessed October 04, 2026).
HandWiki. (2022, November 23). Unperson. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/35946
HandWiki. "Unperson." Encyclopedia. Web. 23 November, 2022.
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Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a fictional totalitarian state and the setting of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell. To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime, as contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy. In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, George Orwell explains that Newspeak usage follows most of the English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Linguistically, the contractions of Newspeak—Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), etc.—derive from the syllabic abbreviations of Russian, which identify the government and social institutions of the Soviet Union, such as politburo (Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Comintern (Communist International), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (Young Communists' League). The long-term political purpose of the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050; during that 66-year transition, the usage of Oldspeak (Standard English) shall remain interspersed among Newspeak conversations. Newspeak is also a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, which Orwell promoted (1942–44) during the Second World War (1939–45), and later rejected in the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946), wherein he criticizes the bad usage of English in his day: dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which produce the meaningless words of doublespeak, the product of unclear reasoning. Orwell's conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."

social institutions phonology komsomol

References

  1. George Orwell (1980) p. 917.
  2. George Orwell (1980) pp. 918–919.
  3. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in George Orwell (1980), pp. 918–922.
  4. "The Principles of Newspeak". newspeakdictionary.com. Archived from the original on 17 February 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130217000821/http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-prin.html. Retrieved 20 March 2013. 
  5. George Orwell (1980) p. 917.
  6. Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker and Warburg. ISBN 978-0-452-28423-4. https://archive.org/details/nineteeneightyfo00orwe_1. 
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