“Newspeak” in Contemporary German Political Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the concept of “newspeak,” created by J. Orwell in his novel “1984,” which functions as one of the means of manipulating the political consciousness of people. The article focuses on the linguistic manifestation of newspeak in the speech behavior of modern German politicians. It reveals two main functions of newspeak in the speech of modern German politicians: confusion and reinterpretation of established concepts. The article explores the corpus of lexical means of German political newspeak, which are realized in the form of framing, empty phrases, paradoxical word constructions, borrowings, neologisms, clericalisms, lexemes with ambiguous meaning, and words with multiple meanings. Among the grammatical means peculiar to newspeak in German political discourse, the article describes the inclusive pronoun “wir,” passive voice, and the conjunctive irrealis in combination with the adverbial modifier of manner. The pragmatic means of realizing newspeak in German political discourse include the imposition of presuppositions, weak efforts to fulfill the intentions, and hyperbolization. The conclusion is drawn that, unlike in totalitarian societies, politicians in democratic countries use newspeak to compensate for the failures of their party, which turns out to be unable to fully implement its declared intentions, mainly through linguistic manipulations.