Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four

We all know that language both written and spoken is one of the greatest advances of mankind, and so it is a power that should be used correctly. In the novel of 1984, we see a clear example of this, within the book we se that the language spoken in it, “Newspeak,” is controlled by the tyrannical government shown in the book. Sometimes words get forgotten, but other times, they are stolen. In this case newspeak had fewer and fewer words that could be used to start a revolution and to keep things going exactly the way their tyrannical government wanted them to.

By shortening the words in newspeak, it narrows the way people think and reduces their memory capacity, so now the government has all the power and instead of thinking, people dedicate their time to other things while the government keeps shortening the language and reducing their memory. By reducing the memory of their citizens, the country is able to stay on its tracks, while people forget everything that has happened before. To many, this might seem like a very improbable case and sometimes, it is something that we live today, either with the media or online, it is reviewed many times before it is posted, and if it is something that doesn’t appeal to the reviewer, it is discarded.

1984 shows us the importance of language, how there is always more and that there should always be a growth of a language, not a decrease. The same is said with programming languages, they have to be in constant improvement and growth, thanks to the increase of powerful hardware that gives us a faster method to process code, then it should also be faster than the way It is normally made and it should also expand, because the needs of the market change each day and should be ready as fast as possible to be able to adapt to the new and improved language