Which famous books did George Orwell write?
Imagine a new language. It has a small vocabulary and simple grammar. There are no irregular verbs or strange spellings to worry about. Nor do you need to learn a lot of words because it is "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.’ Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? English without the hard bits. So why is Newspeak the official language of George Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future, 1984?
Bad Thoughts
For Orwell controlling language was a way of controlling thought. So while the language courses for Newspeak would be shorter (and cheaper!) they wouldn’t be much fun. It can get boring endlessly repeating ‘the government is great’. Actually, you wouldn’t be able to say that because ‘is’ the irregular present of ‘be’. In 1984 there is no free speech, The secret police (called 'Big Brother') is 'watching you'. This was something Orwell saw in dictatorships like Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union. But the original idea for a new perfectly regulated language came from a Polish linguist and pacifist called L.L. Zamanhof.
Esperanto Do you know the words we use to describe he English language. Try this crossword. You can find all the words in the glossary of this section of ESL Reading.
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