Linguaggio e distopia: il ‘Newspeak’ in «Nineteen Eighty-Four» di George Orwell

In the dystopian world that George Orwell imagines in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hegemonic poli-tic party Ingsoc promulgates the Newspeak, a language created in order to satisfy the ideological needs of the Party: to control the individual and prevent the exercise of his free thought. Imaginary languages have al-ways played an important role within the dystopian genre: the structure of society is reflected in that of lan-guage, the intimate relationship between representation of reality language is exploited for political ends. The article investigates - through the perspective of linguistic relativism - the functioning of the relationship between linguistic sign and referent in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The study uses in particular the con-cepts of denotation and connotation and relates them to the iconic surface of words theorized by Berman.