Meaning of Newspeak | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The fictional language devised to meet the needs of Ingsoc and designed to restrict the words, and thereby the thoughts, of the citizens of Oceania in the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
2. Alternative letter-case form of newspeak.
   alt-of, uncountable, usually
3. Use of ambiguous, misleading, or euphemistic words in order to deceive the listener, especially by politicians and officials.
   uncountable, usually
4. A highly dynamic and reflective programming language descended from Smalltalk, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming.

Equivalents

Examples

“In Orwell’s 1984, the use of ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, known as Newspeak, diminishes the range of a person’s thought process. For example, in Newspeak, the term “Fake News” would replace the words: accurate, correct, factual and reliable news reporting.”

“The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc). Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words.”

“Many modern languages like Haskell, Scala, and Newspeak offer parser combinators as libraries on top of the core language.”

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.”

“In 2020, Trump has provided the American people with plenty of Newspeak to explain away the current and growing nationwide spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

“Yet no-one would deny that a form of ‘newspeak’, however altered, is all too prevalent. Where [George] Orwell’s society was governed by the stick, we are offered the carrot. The truncation of the language on ‘Airstrip One’ was a logical response to the harsh social engineering that engendered it. The soothing, delusory world of ‘equality’, of much-touted ‘democracy’, has created a ‘newspeak’ all its own. Rather than shorten the language it is infinitely broadened; instead of curt monosyllables, there are mellifluous, calming phrases, designed to allay suspicions, modify facts and divert one’s attention from difficulties.”

“[T]he last stage in the evolution of the Russian literary avant-garde and its final demise was marked by its sharp and growing conflict with the rise of newspeak. The concept of newspeak has been with us now for quite some time. However, it only recently began to be treated as an exponent of a certain cultural vision advanced by sheer and impudent political power. At the same time, it is more than that. Newspeak can be defined as discourse, proper or peculiar to the totalitarian state and transmitted through the manipulative use of language to all sectors and institutions of the state.”

“[…] Soviet ideology itself may be more productively viewed as the result of conscious attempts to explicate and rationalize assorted discursive strategies, or mechanisms, of newspeak, in much the same way as grammatical rules are invented to describe diverse linguistic practices.”

CEFR level