Nous vivons dans un temps qui veut simplifier la langue, en réduire les frottements, les difficultés – et toutes les causes d’inconfort et de danger, dans l’apprentissage, la culture, les échanges, etc.

Les auteurs sont réécrits, les syllabus expurgés, la langue châtrée de ses archaïsmes, sa structure cassée au profit d’une nouvelle langue inclusive et bienveillante, censée favoriser une meilleure (entendez plus facile, plus simple) communication.

En 1948, George Orwell avait peint ainsi un personnage apparemment secondaire de son roman 1984 (mais qui en est le centre caché, la clé de voute):

’How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

’Slowly,’ said Syme. ’I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’ (…)

’The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ’We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’

(…)  ’It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ”good”, for instance. If you have a word like ”good”, what need is there for a word like ”bad”? ”Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ”good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ”excellent” and ”splendid” and all the rest of them? ”Plusgood” covers the meaning, or ” doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? (…)

’You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. (…)  Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’ (…)

’Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. (…) By 2050 earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. (…)  In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

George Orwell, 1984, Part. 1, chap. 5

Me Philippe Ehrenström, avocat, LLM, CAS, Genève et Onnens (VD)