Newspeak

Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate that is the setting of dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", by George Orwell. In the novel, the ruling English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) created Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism in Oceania. Newspeak is a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will. Such concepts are criminalized as thoughtcrime since they contradict the prevailing Ingsoc orthodoxy.
In "The Principles of Newspeak", the appendix to the novel, Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most of the rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractions of Newspeak—"Ingsoc" (English Socialism), "Minitrue" (Ministry of Truth), "Miniplenty" (Ministry of Plenty)—are described by Orwell as similar to real examples of German and Russian contractions in the 20th century. Like "Nazi" ("Nationalsozialismus") and "Gestapo" ("Geheime Staatspolizei"), "politburo" (Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), "Comintern" (Communist International), "kolkhoz" (collective farm), and "Komsomol" (Young Communists' League), the contractions in Newspeak are supposed to have a political function already in virtue of their abbreviated structure itself: nice sounding and easily pronounceable, their purpose is to mask all ideological content from the speaker.
Orwell and Newspeak.
That Orwell was interested in linguistic questions and questions pertaining to the function and change of language is a fact that can already be seen in his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) as well as in the Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four. As in "Politics and the English Language", the perceived decline and decadence of the English Language is a central theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Newspeak. In the essay Orwell criticises standard English, with its perceived dying metaphors, pretentious diction, and high-flown rhetoric, which he would later satirise in the meaningless words of "doublespeak", the product of unclear reasoning. The conclusion thematically reiterates linguistic decline: "I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this may argue that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development, by any direct tinkering with words or constructions."
Orwell's main objection against this decline of the English language is not so much based on aesthetic grounds, but rather that for him the linguistic decline goes hand-in-hand with a decline of thought, the real possibility of manipulation of speakers as well as listeners and eventually political chaos. The recurring theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four of a connection between authoritarian regimes and (authoritarian) language is already found in "Politics and the English Language": 
Newspeak is a constructed language, of planned phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, like Basic English, which Orwell showed interest in while working at the BBC during the Second World War (1939–1945), but soon came to see the disadvantages of. Newspeak has considerable similarities to the system of Basic English proposed by Charles Kay Ogden in 1930. Basic ('British American Scientific International Commercial') English was a controlled language and designed to be an easy-to-learn English with only 850 core words. Like Newspeak, the Basic vocabulary is classified into three categories, two of them with two subcategories. The classification systems do however not coincide.
Principles.
The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent in ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English). In order to reduce the language's function of communication, Newspeak uses concepts of simple construction, such as pleasure vs. pain and happiness vs. sadness. Additionally, "goodthink" and "crimethink" linguistically reinforce the State's totalitarian dominance of the people of Oceania. The Party's long-term goal with regard to the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles—the working-class of Oceania—to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050.
In Newspeak, English root words function as both nouns and verbs, which reduce the vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning. For example, "think" is both a noun and a verb, thus, the word "thought" is not functionally required to communicate the concepts of thought in Newspeak and therefore is not in the Newspeak vocabulary.
As personal communication, Newspeak is to be spoken in staccato rhythm, using words that are short and easy to pronounce. The Party intends to make speech physically automatic and intellectually unconscious in order to diminish the possibility of critical thought occurring to the speaker. English words of comparative and superlative meanings and irregular spellings were simplified into regular spellings; thus, "better" becomes "gooder" and "best" becomes "goodest". The prefixes "plus-" and "doubleplus-" are used for emphasis (for example, "pluscold" meaning "very cold" and "doublepluscold" meaning "extremely cold"). Adjectives are formed by adding the suffix "–ful" to a root-word, e.g. "goodthinkful" means "Orthodox in thought."; while adverbs are formed by adding the suffix "–wise", e.g. "goodthinkwise" means "In an orthodox manner".
Thought control.
The intellectual purpose of Newspeak is to make Ingsoc-approved thoughts the only expressible thoughts. As constructed, Newspeak's vocabulary communicates the exact expression of sense and meaning that a member of the Party could wish to express. It excludes secondary denotations and connotations. The linguistic simplification of Oldspeak into Newspeak was realised with neologisms, the elimination of ideologically undesirable words, and the elimination of the politically unorthodox meanings of words.
The word "free" still existed in Newspeak, but only to communicate the absence of something, e.g. "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free of weeds". The word could not denote free will, because intellectual freedom was no longer supposed to exist in Oceania. The limitations of Newspeak's vocabulary enabled the Party to effectively control the population's minds, by allowing the user only a very narrow range of spoken and written thought; hence, words such as: "crimethink" (thought crime), "doublethink" (accepting contradictory beliefs), and "Ingsoc" (English Socialism) communicated only their surface meanings.
In the story of "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the lexicologist character Syme discusses his editorial work on the latest edition of the "Newspeak Dictionary":
Vocabulary.
Newspeak words are classified by three distinct classes: the A, B, and C vocabularies.
The words of the A vocabulary describe the functional concepts of daily life (e.g. eating and drinking, working and cooking). It consists mostly of English words, but they are very small in number compared to English, while for each word, its meanings are "far more rigidly defined" than in English.
The words of the B vocabulary are deliberately constructed for political purposes to convey complex ideas in a simple form. They are compound words and noun-verbs with political significance that are meant to impose and instill upon Oceania's citizens politically correct mental attitudes required by the Party. In the appendix, Orwell explains that the very structure of the B vocabulary (the fact that they are compound words) carries ideological weight. The large amounts of contractions in the B vocabulary—for example, the Ministry of Truth being called Minitrue, the Records department being called Recdep, the Fiction Department being called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department being called Teledep—is not done simply to save time. Like with examples of compound words in the political language of the 20th century—Nazi, Gestapo, Politburo, Comintern, Inprecor, Agitprop, and many others—Orwell remarks that the Party believed that abbreviating a name could "narrowly and subtly" alter a word's meaning. Newspeak is supposed to make this effort a conscious purpose: 
The B words in Newspeak are supposed to sound at least somewhat nice, while also being easily pronounceable, in an attempt to make speech on anything political "staccato and monotonous" and, ultimately, mask from the speaker all ideological content. 
The words of the C vocabulary are scientific and technical terms that supplement the linguistic functions of the A and B vocabularies. These words are the same scientific terms in English, but many of them have had their meanings rigidified in order to, just like with the A vocabulary, attempt to prevent speakers from being able to express anti-government thoughts. Distribution of the C vocabulary is limited, because the Party want the citizens of Oceania to know only a select few ways of life or techniques of production. Hence, the Oldspeak word "science" has no equivalent term in Newspeak; instead, these words are simply treated as specific technical words for speaking of technical fields.
Grammar.
Newspeak's grammar is greatly simplifed compared to English. It also has two "outstanding" characteristics: Almost completely interchangeable linguistic functions between the parts of speech (any word could function as a verb, noun, adjective, or adverb), and heavy inflectional regularity in the construction of usages and of words. Inflectional regularity means that most irregular words were replaced with regular words combined with prefixes and suffixes. For example, the preterite and the past participle constructions of verbs are alike, with both ending in "–ed." Hence, the Newspeak preterite of the English word "steal" is "stealed," and that of the word "think" is "thinked." Likewise, the past participles of "swim, give, bring, speak," and "take" were, respectively "swimmed, gived, bringed, speaked," and "taked," with all irregular forms (such as "swam, gave," and "brought") being eliminated. The auxiliaries (including "to be"), pronouns, demonstratives, and relatives still inflect irregularly. They mostly follow their use in English, but the word "whom" and the "shall" and "should" tenses were dropped, "whom" being replaced by "who" and "shall" and "should" by "will" and "would".
Suffixes.
In spoken and written Newspeak, suffixes are also used in the elimination of irregular conjugations:
Therefore, the Oldspeak sentence "He ran extremely quickly" would become "He runned doubleplusspeedwise".
List of Newspeak words.
Note: The novel says that the Ministry of Truth uses a jargon "not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words" for its internal memos. As many of the words in this list (e.g. "bb", "upsub") come from such memos, it is not certain whether those words are actually Newspeak.
See also.
Fiction: