History Main / Newspeak

Neologisms that are based on Newspeak syntax but not coined by Orwell have also appeared, the most notable being ''[[TooManyCooks groupthink]]'' (describing a group thought process where everybody is going along with everybody else and no one is thinking rationally). [[LifeImitatesArt Frighteningly often]] such words are coined in political/media circles (and the [[MemeticMutation Internet]]). For instance, ''{{doublespeak}}'' has retained its Orwellian connotations, even though [[BeamMeUpScotty he never said it]].

** Trying to offend neither side can be even more like newspeak, as the writer has to come up with new non-triggering terms.

* Almost any political topic that requires mention of TheRuleOfCautiousEditingJudgement will likely have a host of InsistentTerminology that one side will claim is more accurate than the term the opposing side claims is accurate. Attempting to list them here is likely to start {{EditWar}}s.

New Speak is a [[{{Fictionary}} fictive language]] invented by Creator/GeorgeOrwell for the novel ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour.'' Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and the inhabitants of Oceania were 'encouraged' to think and converse in Newspeak.

* ''Wiki/TVTropes'': [[TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary This very site]].

* Almost any political topic that requires mention of TheRuleOfCautiousInEditingJudgement will likely have a host of InsistentTerminology that one side will claim is more accurate than the term the opposing side claims is accurate. Attempting to list them here is likely to start edit wars.
** Trying the offend neither side can be even more like newspeak, as the writer has to come up with new non-triggering terms.

* [[CamelCase BiCapitalization]]

* [[TwoPlusTortureMakesFive Two Plus Torture = Five]]

+ [[TheIndexIsWatchingYou Conspiracy Tropes]]
+ [[YouWouldNotWantToLiveInDex Dystopia Tropes]]
+ [[HelpHelpThisIndexIsBeingRepressed Oppression Tropes]]

* Almost any political topic that requires mention of the RuleOfCautiousInEditingJudgement will likely have a host of InsistentTerminology that one side will claim is more accurate than the term the opposing side claims is accurate. Attempting to list them here is likely to start edit wars.

** The most common is using acronyms to refer to everything that comes up frequently, even prominent members names. This is sometimes combined with their tendency to refer to people by their position. For example David Miscavige is referred to as C.O.B.[[note]Chairman of the Board[[/note]]

* [[AynRand Ayn Rand's]] novella ''Anthem'' depicts a stagnant, collectivist future in which words like "I," "Me," "Mine," have been eliminated in favor of "We", "Us," and "Our." He/She has become "They." Other words have been eliminated as well, which the main character rediscovers from ancient texts. Rand's use of the basic concept even predates Orwell.

* Messaging services that charge by the letter give way to a variant of this trope, due to people having to get creative with conveying their thoughts clearly using as short a statement as possible. This happened with telegrams in the past, and it happened again with its SpiritualSuccessor, texting, which bore the oddly appropriate name of "textspeak." Before long, though, telegrams gave way to Morse code and then to telephones, and phone companies stopped charging based on message length and instead by quantity of messages, and this shortened, condensed means of speech died with them both times, though it took several years for textspeak to die down out (but is still in heavy use due to sheer convenience).

* Messaging services that charge by the letter give way to a variant of this trope, due to people having to get creative with conveying their thoughts clearly using as short a statement as possible. This happened with telegrams in the past, and it happened again with its SpiritualSuccessor, texting, which bore the oddly appropriate name of "textspeak." Before long, though, telegrams gave way to Morse code and then to telephones, and phone companies stopped charging based on message length and instead by quantity of messages, and this shortened, condensed means of speech died with them both times, though it took several years for textspeak to die down out of sheer convenience.

* Messaging services that charge by the letter give way to a variant of this trope, due to people having to get creative with conveying their thoughts clearly using as short a statement as possible. This happened with telegrams in the past, and it happened again with its SpiritualSuccessor, texting. Before long, though, telegrams gave way to Morse code and then to telephones, and phone companies stopped charging based on message length and instead by quantity of messages, and this shortened, condense means of speech died with them both times.

The goal of Newspeak was essentially the reduction of vocabulary and destruction of words, especially synonyms and antonyms, and to render language instinctively euphemistic (if "good" already exists then "bad" will be abolished, instead replaced by "ungood"), so as to suppress any possibility of expressing rebellious thoughts against the party in the form of words. Based on [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English#Rules the rules of Basic English]] and the (now [[LanguageEqualsThought discredited]]) strong form of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis]] (the weak form is also controversial), it was intended to be a psychological and linguistic RestrainingBolt on the population of [[AirstripOne Oceania]]. Its construction is similar to {{Esperanto}} (Ungood/Malbona) and other compounding languages (such as German). Contraction conventions from historical totalitarian regimes were also incorporated, resulting in words like "Ingsoc" which are similar in construction to "Comintern", "Nazi" and "Gestapo". Acronyms are used extensively. The Party predicted (or propagandized) that Newspeak would completely supplant English by 2050. Every edition of the Newspeak Dictionary was ''smaller'' than its predecessor.

As noted above, many features of Newspeak are in fact similar to the features of real life compounding languages, including German and Russian, but also many Native American languages. This gave Newspeak a certain "[[BlackSpeech totalitarian flavor]]" at a time when both (East) Germany and Russia had totalitarian governments. This point may be lost today, if only due to the popularity of the phenomenon, the theory that there is a connection between language and social behavior being mostly discredited (after all, people can go through many different governments, totalitarian or not, without changing their language). Also, this makes Newspeak especially difficult to portray in a translation of Literature/NineteenEightyFour into a language that is already agglutinative. If the word for "bad" in your native language is already something like "ungood", translators will have a hard time coming up with a Newspeak version of it.

* {{Room 101}}

[[folder:Meta]]
* A reason you NeverSayDie in fiction.
[[/folder]]

* ''ThisPerfectDay'' has language changed to make words like "fight" and "hate" be considered horrible cusswords, in hopes that the concepts would become anathema, if not exactly unthinkable. After all, if you don't know what hate and violence are, you can't be happy that UNICOMP keeps you free from them, can you? On the other hand, some other words like "fuck" are considered perfectly normal.

[[folder:Videogames]]

[[folder:Web Originals]]

* [[TVTropesWillRuinYourVocabulary This very site]].

** In particular, one of the goals of Newspeak was to replace colorful, evocative, varied expressions with boring, mechanical, precise ones. Many of the article title changes over the course of TVTropes' history are disturbingly close to this ideal.

* Treespeak from ''{{Bionicle}}'' uses a similar sort of syntax, with most terms being of the "adjective-noun" or "noun-verbing" varieties ("leaf-running", "bald-land", etc). The most common variant is to tack "ever-" on the front of words, as a form of emphasis, eg, "ever-forgotten"= "completely forgotten". "Quick-" is also commonly attached to verbs, eg "quick-think".

* In GeneWolfe's BookOfTheNewSun, the Ascians are indoctrinated to speak using only [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascian_language sentences from official propaganda]]

->[+'''Newspeak ''[[TropeCodifier thoughtmaked]]'' the following tropes:'''+]

* ''Wiki/{{Wikipedia}}''. ''[[WeaselWords Some argue]]'' that this ''[[{{Fandom}} notable]]'' [[{{MMORPG}} free encyclopedia]] spawned enough of Newspeak to qualify as a separate dialect. More [[Website/{{Google}} research]] ([[ViewersAreMorons not to be confused]] with ''[[DumbIsGood Original Research]]'') is needed to [[AllBlueEntry tell]] whether [[CaptainObvious it is so]].

->[+'''See also:'''+]

+ [[TheIndexIsWatchingYou Conspiracy Tropes]]
+ [[YouWouldNotWantToLiveInDex Dystopia Tropes]]
+ [[HelpHelpThisIndexIsBeingRepressed Oppression Tropes]]

* [[Creator/GeorgeOrwell Orwellian]]
* Literature/NineteenEightyFour

->[+'''Newspeak ''[[TropeCodifier thoughtmaked]]'' the following tropes:'''+]

* ''KingdomOfLoathing'' features a ski slope graded as "XXX Double-Plus-Ungood".

* Quite a bit of politically correct speech has this, with words being invented to remove "offensive" connotations. An example would be the changing of "man" to "person" in many words(salesman-salesperson, for example).

* The society in ''TheGiver'' enforced what it called "precision of language." Children are strongly reprimanded for using any kind of exaggeration or figurative language, because they lump it under "lying". (The example given is a child who says he is starving when he is only very hungry, because implying that the state would really let anyone starve is seen as extremely problematic.) They can still play pretend, though, so it doesn't hamper their thinking.
** Additionally, due to the Giver system, a great deal of the very concepts of the old world (stavation, war, etc) have been or are in the process of being completely scrubbed out of the collective consciousness this way almost passively. ReleasedToElsewhere is a prime example: it is a DeadlyEuphemism that nobody save the Giver even KNOWS is a euphemism because they have ceased to have virtually any concept of death. Which means that the authorities that order it and the doctors that perform it likely [[FridgeHorror probably don't realize the full ramifications of what they are doing.]] In short: [[UpToEleven NewSpeak so powerful and entrenched that even those that mandate it and enforce don't really recognize it for what it is.]] [[ParanoiaFuel Imagine the kind of psychological tampering THAT would require.]]

* In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's ''{{Green-Sky Trilogy}}'', all negative emotions are lumped under the heading of "troubled" or "unjoyfulness." (And [[StepfordSmiler displaying]] any sort of "unjoyfulness," or even [[TheEmpath feeling it]] in excess, is generally [[{{Pun}} frowned upon]].)