Anti-Newspeak, making a language harder

Question

So, the government of Oceania in 1984 creates a new, altered cersion of English to make its people easier to control.

What about the opposite?

A dictator wants to make his people harder to control, so that any invading nation would have to go through an ungodly amount of trouble to subjugate them.

Could he do it?

I'd imagine he'd start by gradually altering the language to be more complex, more foreign to neighbouring languages, and popularizing words or phrases that are harder to interpret by an outside listener.

He has already completely isolated this nation from the surrounding region, and the language present there is pretty unusual for the region, think Hungarian or Basque.

I am however unsure if this'd be enough; other ideas would be helpful if you think it could be done.

Answer 1

Implement some "levels of trust" in the language: Design phrases or word choices that signal the initiated that you are talking to non-trusted people or that non-trusted people may be listening, design other phrases that signal that you can talk more freely.

I have heard (but I don't have hard references for this) that travellers and gypsies in Europe have such devices in their languages.

Answer 2

The purpose of Newspeak (control) is not achieved by making the language simpler; it is by making it impossible to think certain undesirable things. If the ideology of an invading force is aligned with the ideology of the previous system, then Newspeak would just continue to work fine.

However, if the invaders have an opposing ideology, then the now occupied citizens would presumably not be able to communicate with them at all, as they lack the concepts and means to express the invaders' ideas.

So the complexity of the language is not really related to the issue of control (or non-control), which is achieved by other means.

Answer 3

Incomprehensive languages on themselves never stopped conquering by brute force; the winner's language being imposed on the conquered people.

Forbidding the local language. Out of respect for many fine people in China, I will not mention China. China itself was under colonial suppression with even Opium, though Chinese is hard to master for an European. The colonial past of the Western countries has similar phenomena. There was also the persecution of Esperanto by dictators like Stalin; a language to contact with the rest of the world. As I thinks your proposed self-isolation may have a contrary weakening effect too.

A (pseudo) secret language like from gypsys, or a (high-level) signal language at least caused a cultural identity. But your argument of "ikh ken dir nisht farshteyn" (I cannot understand you - and you not me), would require a stoicism, like in Gordon R. Dickson's sf universe "Soldiers, Ask Not."

Without a culture ready to encorporate pride, stoicism, self-sacrifice it would be hard. Never done with success (native Americans), but alluring as theme in science-fiction.

One scenario: the dictator could oppress his people, and let his secret agents launch a secret revolution language against oppression. That could be feasible.

A further bit of science fiction too: Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao.

Answer 4

Couldn't the dictator just impose a completely new language? If all children were taught this new language at school from a young age, and if all teaching materials and literature they had access to was in that language, they'd eventually forget their parents' tongue. It happens all the time with kids that move to a different country when they're young.

Imposing a new language through the education system would make it easier for the dictator to control access to information and therefore to control the population. At the same time it would create an artificial language barrier with the surrounding nations. Still, it wouldn't be the language itself that makes a population easier or harder to control, only the fact they use a different language.

If you really want a language whose grammar makes it inherently harder to lie and manipulate people, as a thought experiment you could perhaps try to create:

• A language even less expressive than stereotypical caveman speech, where the grammar is so ambiguous it is impossible to understand a sentence outside of its context. Take these words for example:

  Anger death flower friend.

  This could mean many things: It angers me that my friend stepped on the flowers and ruined them / My anger ceased since I was brought flowers by a friend / The death of this person angers me, so I brought flowers to his relatives.

  I don't see how you could incite a revolution or plot a coup while speaking such an ambiguous language. But then again, I don't see how someone could cause a society's communication skills to devolve to that point.

• A very verbose language with a complicated grammar that makes it hard to write short sentences that leave part of the context out, so anyone trying to lie would have to be extremely careful not to contradict themselves. Again, I'm not sure how you could force people to speak such a language for long without it evolving to be more functional.