The Role Of Language In Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange

The role of language is to be an effective form of communication between two or more people. However, language has the consequence of affecting people’s behaviors / actions, their thoughts, and their emotions.

Keith Chen, an economist who appeared on a TED talk, explains the difference between phrases spoken in Chinese and English. The sentence “this is my uncle” is “not as straightforward” in Chinese than it is in English; Chinese requires more information such as “[which] side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger,” to create a grammatically correct sentence (Gross). While the distinction seems small, as the Chinese sentence only requires a few more details

The hypothesis means that human thoughts, perception, and actions are influenced by what language they speak, which is evident in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, where the protagonist, Alex, commits heinous crimes and terrorizes the populace. Throughout the novel, Alex speaks Nadsat, a language created by mixing English, Russian, and other Slavic languages. While Nadsat seems like a childish made up language to the reader, the underlying meaning is terrifying. For example, towards the beginning of the novel, Alex and his droogs, or friends, are looking for “a malenky jest to start off the evening with,” when they come across an old man who is carrying books and decide to harass him (Burgess, 7). The sequence is described completely in Nadsat through Alex’s point of view:

“we began to filly about with him… Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open… Dim yanked out his false zoobies… the old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms - ‘wuf waf wof’- so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot… Pete kicks him lovely in his pot… it not being too hard of a tolchock...” (Burgess, 9 -