How does Language Shape the Way We Think? Read 1984 and You’ll Understand
Or stay here and I could just tell you before it’s too late
The dystopian novel 1984 by Eric Arthur Blair — under his pen name George Orwell—depicts a totalitarian and vigilant society governed by Big Brother where the world is divided into three powers: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.
The course of events happens in Oceania, specifically in the Airstrip One otherwise known as London. Here we follow Winston Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old member of the Party who works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. The Party’s name is Ingsoc (English socialism).
The story begins when…
Here there’s no place for spoilers. Therefore, what I’ll write here is just one of the many aspects that the book encompasses: How does the language we use shape or limit our thoughts about the world we live in?
The Replacement of Standard English
Newspeak is the language of the Party (Ingsoc) that is constantly evolving in order to limit the number of words and in a way narrow the range of thought of the population.
Each word would have a rigid meaning. The aim of newspeak is to make speech independent of consciousness as much as possible and consequently, it would be virtually impossible to say anything that goes against the Party.
“Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meaning rubbed out and forgotten.”
Apart from a dystopian world of mass surveillance where your every move is watched and every sound heard, Orwell describes a place in which even your thoughts are not private and they are constantly manipulated to the level of affecting your view of reality itself.
In the novel, everyone is inundated with constant propaganda and posters in each corner with the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”.
“War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength” as well as “Two and Two make Five” are common mottos also presented, despite being completely opposite.
You might be thinking: How do people believe in those slogans?
The key is doublethink.
It consists of holding simultaneously two opinions that contradict each other but despite that, you believe and reject them when necessary. You replace your perspective for others according to what the Party affirms — which can be from announcing a rise in food when the day before there was more to altering past events such as war alliances and enemies.
In standard English, that term is called “reality control”.
By the use of pretentious words to make a horrific act be regarded as acceptable you change people’s behavior towards something and based on that you can see what important role your respective language plays in your perspective in every-day-life — either it is English, Spanish, French, etc.
Indeed, for someone to form complex thoughts, it would be needed a wide range of words and not a limited collection of simple terms.
But, would it limit the person’s ability to think or in the case of 1984 develop critical thinking against a political ideology? Does someone who speaks German hold a completely distinct view of someone who speaks Pirahã? What comes first: language or thought?
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
There are more than 7000 known languages spoken around the world. Each has a different grammatical structure, pronouns, and vocabulary but they all are used to transmit knowledge.
As they differ in many kinds of ways, it is not surprising that the debate has been going on for centuries as to whether language crafts reality is still present in our modern society.
Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, once said:
“To have a second language is to have a second soul.”
From the 1930s to the 1950s a possible explanation about the level at which language influences a person’s thoughts became quite popular, it was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The theory is named after Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf.
It proposes that an individual’s thoughts and therefore actions are determined by the language that individual speaks — the year of the publication of 1984 was in 1949 so it can be inferred that Orwell used a more radical version of the hypothesis.
There have been studies in the last years that support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to a certain degree.
For instance, while in English we use blue for all the shades of this color, in Russian, there are two words to describe blue based on whether it is bright (pronounced “goluboy”) or dark (pronounced “siniy”).
It has been shown that Russian speakers, by comparison, were 10% faster at distinguishing between light blues and dark blues than English speakers. As more studies are carried out, this is an example of how the language we use allows us to make differences that wouldn’t be immediately noticed by another person — in this case, a categorical distinction in the color spectrum.
A second situation is when describing an object, we often assign it adjectives depending on its grammatical gender, whether it is masculine or feminine.
For example, the word “bridge” is feminine in German. For that reason, people who speak German tend to associate that word with stereotypically female-related adjectives such as beautiful and elegant. On the other hand, “bridge” is masculine in Spanish and therefore people often relate it with strong or tall.
These are some examples that in a way confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, though not entirely. Now there is Neo-Whorfianism, a weaker version of this hypothesis that says language influences a speaker’s view of the world but does not determine it.
This raises another question: if words like justice or freedom do not exist in a certain language, would the people who speak it be able to think about those concepts? What comes first, thought or language?
The Chicken and Egg Problem
As mentioned, the previous hypothesis was famous until the 1950s, when new theories came up opposing earlier works and leaving their mark in modern society.
Here, the psychologist Steven Pinker put forth the concept of “mentalese”.
He argues that all humans have an innate language of thought and knowing a language is to just translate your thoughts into your respective language so as to communicate with others.
It can be said that first comes thought, and then language. This complex relationship is included in the culture we live in.
Although in the example of Russian and English speakers the results showed that some were more likely to make a distinction between light and dark blue, this did not make the others to unable to distinct those shades — it was just slower because they value different things.
Languages are human creations that we have invented to suit our needs centuries ago and they are still evolving according to our current requirements.
Associating this concept with 1984 we can say that even though in Newspeak the word for freedom in terms of “political freedom” or “freedom of expression” is erased from the vocabulary, people would still be able to think about it in their language of thought. It would still exist but probably be expressed in a new word or group of words.
The basic feelings of love, generosity, and justice would remain present; as well as critical thinking towards a totalitarian government.
Final Reflections
To conclude, despite being far from living in an authoritarian society governed by one big omnipresent entity, George Orwell was warning us about a future where forms of manipulative language are used to make us behave in a certain way for an external interest.
Advertisements about fitness or clothes, reality shows, and social media can be employed for keeping us buying, watching, and commenting on everything we see.
Don’t get me wrong. Social media has brought several benefits but when you enter the public sphere something is lost in that process. Your privacy
In the dystopian novel, there were screens that watch people’s moves because it was mandatory but now we carry them wherever we go (smartphones) and, in a way, report what we are doing (posts online).
Recommendations of posts by social media’s algorithms decide what you see and shape, or rather narrow, your vision of the world.
Therefore, we should be careful about sharing our personal information online because as we have seen in recent years, we are not the customers; we are the products.
