ABSTRACT
Language as a system does not change with political regimes, but the way it is used does, and the changes under totalitarian rule are arguably the most drastic. In his satirical utopia, 1984, George Orwell characterised these changes as Newspeak, a jargon designed to ‘meet the ideological needs’ of the ruling dictatorship of the fictitious state of ‘Oceania’. Its purpose is to establish ‘doublethink’, the ‘power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them' (Orwell 1984), which finds its most (in)famous expression in the deliberately paradoxical slogans of the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (i.e. the Ministry of Propaganda): ‘WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH’ (Orwell 1984). Orwell based Newspeak on the experiences of contemporary propagandistic language during the National Socialist and Stalinist dictatorships, in particular, obfuscation of references to historical events, denial and euphemistic cover-up of state crimes, vilification of dissent, and formulaic and hyperbolic discourse. In the following sections, we will argue that these functional features do indeed form a coherent type of political language use that is of specific socio-political significance and thus needs to be on the agenda of any critically interested and engaged theory of political communication.
