Newspeak

See also: newspeak

English

Etymology

From new +‎ speak, coined by George Orwell in 1949 in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The programming language was so named because of its “shrinkable” design, following Orwell's idea of a continually diminishing vocabulary in Newspeak.

Proper noun

Newspeak

1. (fiction) The fictional language devised to meet the needs of Ingsoc and designed to restrict the words, and thereby the thoughts, of the citizens of Oceania in the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
   • 2020 November 19, Richard Weintraub, “Trump's use of 'Newspeak' to explain away virus puts Americans at risk | For What It's Worth”, in Pocono Record‎^[1], archived from the original on 17 April 2026:

     In Orwell’s 1984, the use of ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, known as Newspeak, diminishes the range of a person’s thought process. For example, in Newspeak, the term “Fake News” would replace the words: accurate, correct, factual and reliable news reporting.

   • 2021 January 5, Peter Foster, “Peter Foster: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050”, in Financial Post‎^[2], archived from the original on 31 March 2021:

     The instrument of this dumbing down in Nineteen Eighty-Four was Newspeak, the official language of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc). Newspeak was a sort of Totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting and manufacturing words.

2. (computer languages) A highly dynamic and reflective programming language descended from Smalltalk, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming.
   • 2010, Debasish Ghosh, DSLs in Action, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN:

     Many modern languages like Haskell, Scala, and Newspeak offer parser combinators as libraries on top of the core language.

Derived terms

• fanspeak
• newspeak

Descendants

• → Catalan: novaparla (calque)

Translations

fictional language

• Albanian: gjuha e re f
• Armenian: նորալեզու (noralezu)
• Belarusian: навамо́ўе n (navamówje)
• Bulgarian: новго́вор m (novgóvor)
• Catalan: novaparla (ca) f
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 新語 / 新语 (zh) (xīnyǔ), 新話 / 新话 (zh) (xīnhuà)

• Czech: newspeak (cs) m
• Danish: nysprog n
• Dutch: Newspeak
• Esperanto: novparolo
• Estonian: uuskeel
• Finnish: uuskieli (fi)
• French: novlangue (fr) f
• Georgian: ახალმეტყველება (axalmeṭq̇veleba)
• German: Neusprech (de) n, Neusprache f (older translation)
• Hebrew: שִׂיחָדָשׁ (he) m (siaḥadásh)
• Hungarian: újbeszél (hu)
• Icelandic: nýlenska
• Italian: neolingua
• Japanese: ニュースピーク (nyūsupīku), 新語 (ja) (しんご, shingo)
• Korean: 신어(新語) (ko) (sineo), 뉴스피크 (nyuseupikeu)
• Lithuanian: naujakalbė f
• Macedonian: нового́вор m (novogóvor)
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: nytale m

• Polish: nowomowa (pl) f
• Portuguese: novilíngua f, novafala f, novidioma m
• Romanian: novlimbă f
• Russian: новоя́з (ru) m (novojáz)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: новоговор m

  Latin: novogovor m

• Slovene: novorek m
• Spanish: neolengua f
• Swedish: nyspråk (sv) n
• Ukrainian: новомо́ва (uk) f (novomóva)
• Welsh: Newyddiaith f

Noun

Newspeak (usually uncountable, plural Newspeaks)

1. Alternative letter-case form of newspeak.
   • 1995 June 22, Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”, in The New York Review of Books‎^[3], archived from the original on 31 January 2017:

     All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

   • 2020 November 19, Richard Weintraub, “Trump's use of 'Newspeak' to explain away virus puts Americans at risk | For What It's Worth”, in Pocono Record‎^[4]:

     In 2020, Trump has provided the American people with plenty of Newspeak to explain away the current and growing nationwide spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Translations

newspeak — see newspeak

See also

• political correctness
• spin