Language, thought, and manipulation

You might be familiar with the concept that language and thought are intertwined. The idea goes back to the time of Ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Plato believed that we cannot experience the world but through language, and Prussian philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt thought it to be the fabric of thought, an idea that was popularised by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The hypothesis states that the structure of a language determines the way its speakers think. For instance, the number of basic colour words of a language influences the way the speaker of that particular language perceives colours. Today, linguists are more inclined to accept the weaker version of the hypothesis—the idea of linguistic relativity, which states that language influences our thoughts but doesn’t determine them. Language certainly plays an important role in human cognition. Let’s find out how exactly.

You must have heard of George Orwell’s famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian novel set in a fictional world called Oceania in which language (in this case ‘Newspeak’) plays a crucial role in establishing the new system of life in the novel. Through the example of Nineteen Eighty-Four to describe how language manipulates thought, I will show what contemporary evidence exists of the autocracy of government language. It’s not just fiction; it’s reality.

The creators of the new governmental system in Nineteen Eighty-Four, called Ingsoc, devise this language to control thoughts. They influence people by making them perceive only certain matters and by deliberately making people forget everything deemed inappropriate. If something cannot be named, it does not exist—that is the principle that functions in the society of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak words are divided into three distinct classes, namely the A, B, and C vocabularies.

A vocabulary: Language and thought

The A vocabulary is used to describe daily activities, mainly with a limited set of words already used in ‘Oldspeak’ (the normative language the people spoke before the government invented Newspeak). A limited pool of words points out the fact that life is a simple routine. With the vocabulary so tightly policed, people cannot develop their own idiolect (an individual’s unique way of using a language) and, as language and identity are closely connected, the expression of one’s individuality becomes more challenging.

When languages such as Basic English (devised by Charles Kay Ogden not for the purpose of control but to aid second language learners in grasping the English language), with some 850 words, are created, it deliberately limits the range of words that people can use to express themselves, thus limiting linguistic creativity. Imagine someone placing limits on what you can put into words. Any new, original thought or plan you had in mind would be lost, or more accurately, would not even have existed in the first place. Consequently, your individuality, would disappear.

Words in Newspeak have no possible second meanings, so whatever one says is literally what one means, and word range is limited by introducing interchangeability between word classes, e.g. the same word is used for a noun and a verb. That way, thoughts are simplified without much work. In an organic language environment, the extents of one’s vocabulary expand with age, as people grasp more and newer concepts and seek ways to express them through language. A child utters approximately 3,881 distinct words a day at the age of 1 year and 5 months, as opposed to 28,142 at the age of 9 years and 7 months, according to British linguist David Crystal.

So, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, instead of expanding over time to account for new concepts, developments, or inventions, vocabulary is constrained by design: the Party limits it, and adults cannot reach a satisfactory level of cognition, as they have no words with which to utter their thoughts and reach conclusions on different topics. Also, words are very simply formed by adding certain affixes and language exhibits complete regularity, which makes the production of language almost automatic.

That is exactly what the leaders of the regime want: everything is to be simple and straightforward, so that people talk about a controlled set of topics and don’t dwell too much on them. For example, in Newspeak, adjectives are formed by adding the suffix -ful to a noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. So, speedful means ‘rapid’, and speedwise means ‘quickly’. There are no irregular verb conjugations, plural forms, or comparative or superlative forms of adjectives. The preterite of think is thinked, the plural of man is mans, and the comparative form of good is gooder. There is also no need for words such as bad, as the antonym of good is simply ungood.

But now, don’t think English would be one such simplified language compared to, for instance, my mother tongue, Croatian, which is highly morphological, or Mandarin Chinese with its complex script. Do complex morphology or script imply that Croatian or Mandarin Chinese speakers are more intelligent? Of course not. Every language is a highly complex system, and that complexity manifests itself in different forms. If you’re not convinced, think of all the English language spelling bee contests around the world that simply wouldn’t make sense in languages like Spanish that have few to no irregular spellings.

B vocabulary: Language and ideology

The B vocabulary consists of words devised for the ideology of the Party. Umbrella terms are coined through compounds, such as the word sexcrime, which narrows all possible meanings in just one word and marks out the action of ‘sex’ as a crime. What is especially interesting in B vocabulary are the euphemisms and metaphors used. Orwell wrote, in a separate essay:

“Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”

That is exactly what is used in Nineteen Eighty-Four…and today. When you come to think of it, we often hear about the pacification scheme for Syria, whereas it’s really a war scheme. In corporate lingo, downsizing, really means firing people. The Australian government uses the term illegal maritime arrivals to describe asylum seekers. In this way, framing can change people’s perception of something. Generally speaking, framing is a powerful tool, especially in marketing, such as when you see “95% fat-free” labels on food products, instead of “only 5% fat”, because then you subconsciously focus on the positive part.

By using particular words, you evoke a specific mental picture in the reader or listener’s mind. For instance, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, forced-labour camps are called joycamps, which completely obscures the torture taking place in the camps. That is used as a powerful tool of control. When you hear the word joy, you would immediately think of something pleasant and positive, and not of the upsetting and agonizing reality of the joycamps.

The Party members devise these metaphors because they are powerful enough to manipulate the masses. Figures of speech can shape people’s inferences on something. The names of the ministries clearly demonstrate this, with names that indicate something different from what they are really in charge of. The Ministry of Love deals with law, order, and punishment; the Ministry of Peace with war; the Ministry of Plenty oversees curtailing supplies; and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of the alternative truth, rewriting the facts to suit the needs of the Party (does that ring a bell?). However, when people hear the names of those ministries, they have the surface-level interpretation in mind and believe the ministries to be in charge of what their names suggest. As a result, nobody questions what these ministries are really doing.

The same applies to Big Brother, a name for the ultimate leader in the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which implies a nurturant leader, not an authoritarian one, so people in the novel accept his supervision and autocracy willingly. Interestingly, this term is now a snide remark against any authoritarian entities like governments or even closed-circuit security cameras.

The word “victory” is used constantly, such as in the names of products like Victory Gin, which makes people believe that they in the victorious nation they belong to, otherwise why would they have so many Victory products? As a result, they do not have a reason to question the Party. Slogans of the Party, such as“War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, and “Ignorance is Strength”, are ways of establishing the so-called doublethink, harboring concepts which are self-contradictory. The slogans appear all the time on screens and can be heard through loudspeakers by all and sundry.

As linguist George Lakoff explains in his blog,

“Words are neurally linked to the circuits that determine their meaning. The more a word is heard, the more a circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again.”

By repeating those slogans constantly, people start believing them and become desensitised to it. People see them as intuitive, and not in the way they are supposed to be—the exact opposite, i.e. counter-intuitive. Hence, the concept of doublethink is very easily accepted by everyone. That is the key of the system: people accepting new values and systems of control without feeling like they were imposed. (If you want to learn more about this, I suggest you read Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant!)

“[U]ltimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the high brain centers at all”, Orwell writes in the appendix. People merely generate words as a sort of formal symbols that they have been introduced to by the Regime without really understanding them. That is what the so-called duckspeak, encouraged by the Party, is all about. People just utter random phonemes without considering their meanings, doing it automatically without involving their brains in the process. It reminds me of John Searle’s thought experiment, the Chinese room, in which the computer in it doesn’t really understand the words it generates; it is not conscious. (Now that’s a matter that deserves an article of its own considering the complexity of automatic speech production.)

The usage of abbreviations is also curious in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When abbreviations are used, people do not give it much, if any, thought. As a result, they do not associate those words with their intended meanings. In his paper “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell explains that that is the practice that was widely used by totalitarian systems:

Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.

The same goes for many large organizations of today, from Oxfam to FAO and the like. People have general ideas about those, not really knowing what their names stand for. Very few people consider the meaning of the abbreviations that are presented to them. So, the citizens of Oceania would have a picture in their head of what Minitrue, as the Ministry of Truth is often called, represents, but it would not occur to them to analyze what it really means. They see everything only superficially.

The same applies to Ingsoc. It is a rather vague word when you come to think of it. It may imply socialism, but English socialism, which makes it different from the idea of socialism tied to the Soviet Union that people usually have. It may be a political system, but it may also be an economic one or an ideological one. The result is pure vagueness.

This is the case with the names of many political parties today. What does Germany’s SPD imply, or France’s LREM, or Britain’s Labour Party, which, though not an abbreviation, exhibits the same kind of vagueness? We have a general idea, but more often than not they turn out to be very different from what their names suggest. The Labour Party is supposed to take the side of the working class, as its name implies, but throughout the history of their governance in Britain, they have taken some measures going against workers, such as that of introducing high university fees. No wonder people are confused, and that there are many swing voters and those who don’t take any interest in politics and decide not to vote.

C vocabulary: Control

The C vocabulary consists of technical and scientific terms. As there is no word for science in Newspeak, what it means cannot be grasped by the citizens of Oceania, so the Party’s goal of perpetuating its citizens’ ignorance of science and higher-learning is accomplished. Just think of the Trump administration’s recent attempt at censorship of scientific vocabulary at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The directive allegedly stated that terms like ‘science-based’ and ‘fetus’ are supposed to be avoided, which gives ideology a chance to creep into science. The meaning of words is narrowed down by the Party, who only want very specific meanings of potentially abstract words. As an example, in Newspeak, the word equal can only mean that people are “equal in their appearance”, and never that they have equal rights. The Party erases meanings of entire words, so that new generations, when learning the language, grasp only the meanings that the Party wants them to grasp.

In organic languages, the context in which a word is found contributes to its meaning. So, one word can have multiple meanings, as we are able to understand the intended meaning thanks to the surrounding words. When the Party enforces the use of a word in a single context in Newspeak, it is eventually associated with only the particular context that is aligned with the restrictive goals of the Party. That is why in real life, translation is a difficult business, as translation is not just about changing a word in a source language to another word in a target language but rather transferring the sense which is established in context from one language to another.

As a result, in Oceania, people have nothing to compare themselves to and thus can live only in the present moment, without much room for nostalgia and retroflection. They cannot know that anything different existed before or that there is an alternative to their world, and they can hardly imagine their future. When books, of which the medium is language, disappear, people are deprived of many different ideas and concepts they wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to. Linguistic creativity is all around us, present in our everyday lives and it lets our minds conceive anything and as a result can enable us to achieve anything. When that access is removed from us, so too are many of our mental capacities and freedoms.

Such is the way the Party achieves its goal of absolute control—by controlling language. With such limited vocabulary, with a language devised for the sole purpose of exerting control over citizens, people become obedient citizens who never question their government. Those who don’t obey, disappear: taken away and punished by the Party. Such a repressive government cannot let anyone understand what they are doing and how it is that they do it.

The way people communicate with each other, elaborate on different topics and express their thoughts and feelings freely is through language. Depriving people of that means establishing a significant amount control over them. Orwell’s creation of a language devised specifically for controlling people perfectly demonstrates the way that language influences the human mind, thus enabling manipulation, be it benign or sinister. That way people become simple cogs of a system, which is exactly what a repressive government, as is the one in Nineteen Eighty-Four, wants.

Now you know what to watch for, don’t say you haven’t been warned!