The Importance Of Language In 1984 George Orwell

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, we see a distopic world which is ruled by totalitarian superstates. Our lead character Winston Smith works for a ministry in the state of Oceania.

One of the key points of maintaining the control in the state is the control of language. To talk about the necessity of it, we first have to talk a little bit about the importance of the languages and learning different ones. Cultures are shaped by people and the languages they use and vice-versa. Learning a language, even a tiny bit of it, helps us to understand a part of the culture. And with that our horizon is widened and we can look at things from different perspectives. Same goes for our own language: Learning our own language helps us to understand our current surroundings, thus enables us to question them. And that is the opposite of what a state such as Oceania wants.

In the fictional world of 1984, the state of Oceania's official language is called Newspeak. In a part of the novel a character called Syme who works

He works at the Ministry of Truth where they distort the past. There actually is a Party slogan in the novel that says, “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” In the Ministry of Truth Winston’s job is to change every bit of information about the past that would contradict the current events whether it’s a book, a pamphlet or a poster. If they are currently in war with Eurasia and allies with Eastasia, everything that indicates the opposite in the past has to be changed. They control the current events, thus they control the past. So changing the past and reflecting it as a nightmare instead of a good period of time would make people to think that they’ve been liberated rather than being enslaved by this powerful authority figure. Thus they wouldn’t imagine a good future to work for because they have never seen an example of it in the