Nadsat and Newgens

There’s a moment for everyone when reading Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange where the reader notices they’re no longer reading a book in English. If you don’t know it, A Clockwork Orange is a novel by Anthony Burgess, polyglot and expert linguist, written in a partly English, partly Russian, partly gibberish dialect Burgess calls Nadsat. This is a ridiculous thing to pick through. I put the short book (it barely grazes a two-hundred page count) down countless times before genuinely setting my mind towards understanding the text. 

Gradually, you start to pick up on the meaning of these words through context, which is where Burgess’s writing shines. He allows this contextual learning to happen slowly. He mixes gibberish with English, ramping it up to pages of purely Nadsat dialogue. And the craziest thing? You get it. Exchanges like, “Yarbles is what I say to him, I’d chain his glazzies out as soon as look.” can start to sound forthright. 

There’s a point to this. On one side, Burgess wished for the language in the novel to be futuristic and timeless. He captured this by putting his years as a linguist to the test and mashing together a slang of Russian and English with various sing-song phrases like “appy-polly logies.” On the other side, Burgess wanted to test out his abilities as a linguist in a somewhat revolutionary way by taking the slang and accelerating its ridiculous etymology to a future in which the words have no basis. This got me thinking – is brainrot really the future of language?

If by chance you relate to hearing the phrase, “lemme rizz this ethereal shyt on some Von type timing,” congratulations, shake your dreads! You are in an era of linguistic hyperevolution. Dialects and language are the result of ingroups developing words to refer to something within their niche. This can be done in a few different ways. Compounding creates words based on their literal meaning in the base of the dialect. Words like this include “newgens” (referring to the new generation finding “niche” and underground artists) and “lolcow” (referring to a bully-able/cringeworthy person online), etc. Acronyms worm their way into becoming symbolistic shorthand on online platforms, examples such as “sybau1” and “ts pmo2” and “iykyk3” create a new type form for people who know what they mean. 

What’s the correlation? These are all a result of online communities being able to form groups at a pace never before seen in history. 

When such phrases begin to leak into the common dialect you can start to see less of a division of the young generation and the old, but of those better versed on the technological landscape. This is exactly the way Nadsat is portrayed in A Clockwork Orange to be the esoteric dialect of the young gangs as opposed to the general language of the youth at the time. Though this relationship is not necessarily definitive, this similarity in rapidly developing dialogue in young groups is increasingly fascinating. Doubly so knowing that Burgess, a writer of the 60’s, could present such a well-garbled dialect not too far from the slang of today.