Newspeak is the language of Oceania, a totalitarian state ruled by the Party, who created the language to meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (Ingsoc). In the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published by George Orwell in 1949, Newspeak is a controlled language, of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, a linguistic design meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that ideologically threatens the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who thus criminalised such concepts as thoughtcrime, contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.
“The Principles of Newspeak”, the appendix to the novel, explains that Newspeak usage follows most of the English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. Linguistically, the contractions of Newspeak — Ingsoc (English Socialism), Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), etc. — derive from the syllabic abbreviations of Russian, which identify the government and social institutions of the USSR, such as politburo (Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Comintern (Communist International), kolkhoz (collective farm), and Komsomol (Young Communists’ League). The long-term political purpose of the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles — the working-class of Oceania — to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by the year AD 2050; during that 66-year transition, the usage of Oldspeak (Standard English) shall remain interspersed among Newspeak conversations.