Research Article

Viewing Orwellian Newspeak from the Angle of Linguistics: An “Economic” Redundancy

Authors

  • Liqiao Liang Postgraduate student of Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation (GIIT), Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China

Abstract

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has been widely studied, but not one of his important inventions in that novel. That is his Newspeak. From the perspective of linguistics, one of the most important characteristics of the development of language(s) is the feature of the economy, which means that language evolves in various ways to streamline and make it easier for its users to express themselves. This is not the case with the English variant "Newspeak" created by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is somehow simpler in form than standard English, which was named "Oldspeak", but "Newspeak" is actually in a sense simpler than "Oldspeak". Newspeak" is actually much more obscure than "Old speech" in a sense. The reason for this may be found in comparison with several typical language simplification movements. In order to investigate the issues, former researchers` findings would be referenced, and textual evidence would be found and discussed in the article.

Article information

Journal

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

Volume (Issue)

4 (12)

Pages

146-151

Published

2021-12-23

How to Cite

Liang, L. (2021). Viewing Orwellian Newspeak from the Angle of Linguistics: An “Economic” Redundancy. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 4(12), 146–151. https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2021.4.12.16

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Keywords:

Linguistics; “Orwellian”; Nineteen Eighty-Four; Newspeak; Standard English; Language simplification movement