Educational Resources: Newspeak

The Orwell Society is determined to provide educationalists with tools and resources to help their students better understand the work of George Orwell. These include background briefings and examinations of how Orwell’s books are constructed.

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Our subject is Newspeak, the language of Oceania in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Our speaker is Brennan Conaway, a writer and artist who is currently teaching English at a Japanese university.

He used the guidelines from Orwell’s ‘Principles of Newspeak’ to construct the newspeak language, which he believed did not exist previously, and then used that constructed language to rewrite Nineteen Eighty-Four, in his book year84.

Our lesson is hosted on Youtube, where you will find other Orwell Society recordings.

You will find a short account of the book elsewhere on our website.

Paragraph 1 compared Orwell and Conaway (PDF)