What is it about?
One of the most distinctive aspects of Anthony Burgess's novel 'A Clockwork Orange' is the invented language used by its narrator, Alex, and his peers. This paper describes the way we approached the task of identifying the various components of this language, which is composed mainly of Russian vocabulary but also includes other elements such as shortened words; it then discusses the results we found.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This is the first attempt to isolate Nadsat using computer-aided methods and therefore represents a step forward compared to previous attempts. It also presents a method that could be used for isolating items in other works that incorporate invented languages.
Perspectives
This work is part of a project that is investigating how Nadsat changes when 'A Clockwork Orange' is translated into other languages and will therefore be followed up by studies on French, Greek, Polish, German etc. One study is already published - Sofia Malamatidou (2017) 'Creativity in translation through the lens of contact linguistics: a multilingual corpus of A Clockwork Orange', The Translator.
Dr Benet Vincent
Coventry University
This linguistically rigorous definition and analysis of Nadsat is the first of its kind and will be used as the basis for future attempts to examine how the translation of invented language functions across a range of target languages.
Jim Clarke
Sapienship
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The language of A Clockwork Orange: A corpus stylistic approach to Nadsat, Language and Literature International Journal of Stylistics, August 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0963947017706625.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
