The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate the expression of the shades of meaning inherent to ambiguity and nuance from Oldspeak (Standard English) in order to reduce the language's function of communication, by way of simplistic concepts of simple construction—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness,
goodthink and
crimethink—the last one of these which linguistically reinforces the State's
totalitarian dominance of the people of
Oceania. In Newspeak, English root words function as both nouns and verbs, which reduce the vocabulary available for the speaker to communicate meaning. For example,
think is both a noun and a verb, thus, the word
thought is not functionally required to communicate the concepts of
thought in Newspeak and therefore is not in the Newspeak vocabulary.