What is the fake language spoken in ‘A Clockwork Orange’?
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange is perhaps most famous for its dark portrayal of humanity’s capacity for violence. But the reason the violence on screen is so compelling is the world in which it plays out.
Kubrick constructs a dystopian vision of society at some point in the near future, where the moral codes maintaining social order have broken down. Juvenile delinquents roam free, raping and pillaging wherever they go, while only the iron fist of an authoritarian state prevents complete lawlessness.
What really brings this nightmarish vision to life is the level of detail in the world-building. Kubrick uses key elements from the Anthony Burgess novel on which his film is based to immerse us in its world.
The director and his production team furnish the dystopia with their own visual touches, from retro-future sets to distinctive costumes and bold, jarring colour palettes. But otherwise, they rely heavily on the language Burgess invented for his novel to paint the picture.
Thanks to his study of music and languages, as well as his extensive travels, by the time he came to write the novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962, Burgess was an amateur expert in linguistics. He created the language Nadsat as a means of portraying the youth subculture prevalent in the novel.
What is Nadsat?
Rather than a fully fleshed out in the manner of JRR Tolkien’s Sindarin and Quenya in his novel Lord of the Rings, Nadsat is a form of slang adopted by Alex DeLarge, A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, and his gang of teenage thugs.
It draws its vocabulary from several real-world sources. Most notably Russian, from which the word ‘nadsat’ itself is taken. The word is actually a Russian suffix equivalent to the English ‘teen’ and refers to juvenile delinquents themselves as well as the slang they use.
The most common Nadsat word in the movie is ‘droog’, which is the Russian word for a close friend. It’s also a double-entendre on the Welsh word ‘drwg’, meaning evil. Alex uses it to refer to his own gang of “droogs”. Other common Russian words incorporated into Nadsat include ‘glas’, meaning eyes, which is turned into “glazz” and “glazzies”.
It’s not just Russian that Burgess drew from, though. There are bits of German (such as ‘shlaga’ from the German for ‘club’ or ‘bat’) and Romani (‘dook’, used to mean ‘trace’ or ‘ghost’ but originally meaning ‘magic’).
Patterns of English cockney rhyming slang and childlike diminution of words are present as well. For instance, ‘money’ is known as ‘cutter’, from the cockney rhyme ‘bread and butter’. Meanwhile, ‘school’ is turned into the childish diminutive ‘skolliwoll’.
Altogether, this hybrid of many language derivations is morphed into a coherent code of slang that fits Alex DeLarge perfectly. Especially in the northern English lilt of actor Malcolm McDowell, during first-person narrations in which Alex introduces us to particular events in the movie.
Nadsat tells us most of all that the world of the film is not exactly our own. There is something off about the place Alex DeLarge inhabits, which serves to underscore the horrifying acts committed there.
