DYSTOPIA THROUGH (FORMS OF) DISCOURSE IN GEORGE ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
DYSTOPIA THROUGH (FORMS OF) DISCOURSE IN GEORGE ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

Summary/Abstract: According to the agents who consciously use language in Nineteen Eighty-Four – the author (who both creates and metafictionally explains the new language), the oligarchs (who use language as a means of manipulation), the rebels (who use it as a means of resistance against thought control) – language is the touchstone, the battleground, the private code of and on which the new world is to be built. Thus, the new language can and has to be analysed on more levels: on the one hand, the propagandistic language used by Orwell throughout the entire novel with the purpose of building the scaffolding of a system and, on the other hand, the invention of Newspeak as a linguistic tool in itself supported by the existence of the Dictionary. The first level has become a trademark for the novel, while the second is meant to bring to the foreground the issue of the vital relationship between language and thought, more specifically the determining of the latter by the former. Equally important are new forms of language developed in the political speeches, the so called “Duckspeak”, but also the confessive language used by the main character in his diary or the one used by the proles helped and shaped through the use of abbreviation, jargon, regularization and euphemisms. The paper to analyse all these closely in order to demonstrate the importance of language in shaping a nation/community and the risk of transforming a nation/community into a dystopic space when language is misused/misemployed/mishandled by a totalitarian regime

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