ESSAY 1: ORWELL AND STANDARD IDEOLOGY

José Manuel Alonso Pereda

Orwell has a negative vision of standarization. On the one hand on his concept of “Official
language” he criticizes that a “official” language is not accesible for everybody specially for
common people because it is made of a classical lexicon made of Latin and Greek words that
not everybody posses knowledge of. For Orwell this kind of prescripted language looks artificial
and not natural. He would prefer the usage of a more “demotic speech” rather than a
standardized one full of formal styles. Orwell feels that instead of helping the communication
to be easier standard language makes it more difficult to communicate between people. On
the other hand on his concept of “Newspeak” he expresses that standarization could harm
language by switching meaning of words therefore causing the dissaparation of significances of
words that were useful. For Orwell a harmful government intervention on language can be
done in Newspeak that would affect the level of system in language and freedom of thought.

2. Nowadays we can find several examples of Orwell´s official language. For instance we can
find Latin words in law. In law we find Latin words like: “quid pro quo ”(“pro hac vice”, “locus
in quo”(place in which) , mens rea ( guilty mind).
Another Latin words that we use nowadays are: et cetera ( and so on), per se ( in itself) , versus
(against), viceversa (the other way around)
We can also find several examples of Greek words. To give some examples marathon, Europe
( mythological princess), democracy (demos:people + kratos: power), phobia, planet ( comes
from plan
This official language has several purposes in society. One of them is to apply technical
knowledge to specific aspects of life like law and use the specific vocabulary from which the
words came from. . Other one is to apply synonyms to certain words.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/21-english-words-that-are-actually-greek-and-the-
stories-behind-them