Orwell believed that totalitarianism and the corruption of language were connected. He focused especially on political language where you distort events and concepts by calling them something else. As an example, in Politics and the English Language, he said that ‘If thoughts can corrupt language, language can also corrupt thoughts. ‘ This idea would eventually lead to “Newspeak”.

Language as Mind Control

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. If control of language was centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them. This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.