Linguistic engineering: language and politics in Mao's China

In the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell imagined a future society in which everyone accepted the official ideology and in which punishment and terror were unnecessary.Instead, people were kept under control because they spoke, heard, read, and wrote only a single, specially contrived language-the language of Newspeak:Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism.It was expected that Newspeak would finally have superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. . . .The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought-that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc-should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.To give a single example.The word free still