Language as a Tool to Control: A Case of Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

As a result of imposition of language that creates, shapes and strengthens the discourse of the authority on the one hand and the restrictions in use of language on the other, the characters in the novels are detached from their own past, alien to their own family and unaware of what exactly is happening to them. The characters in the novels are slaves of media for they revere it as an oracle. The media is so much strong because the public is widely exposed to it and is made to believe the media. The government uses such a language to create discourse by means of telescreeen and spokesman of the authority that narrows and distracts the range of thinking. Along with the control of people's knowledge about present reality, the party in the novel has an ingenious plan to break link with the real past by introducing a language barrier. After all, language is the link to past or history. But when, by introducing a language barrier, knowledge about past is destroyed, people are no longer capable of decoding information from the past.