Jonathan Swift and Newspeak

Gulliver’s Travels meant more to George Orwell ‘than any other book ever written’ and was an important literary antecedent in the development of Newspeak.  From the opening sentences of his first professional article as a journalist, published in Paris during 1928, Orwell was obsessively interested in how the state endeavoured to censor language: “The present […]

Orwell, Newspeak & Esperanto

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in The Times were written in it, […]