Devising and Revising a Dialect

The case of Nadsat

Fellow Substacker

Lillian Wang Selonick

has inspired me to dig up another essay from the vault (my old blog, that is) and rework it a little for publication here. The catalyst on this occasion was this post. A Clockwork Orange is mentioned as a formative book. It was a formative book for my teenage self as well, and judging from the comments, for a lot of other people too.

I think that for most readers, this book makes its indelible impression above all because of the way its dismal, violent future world is conveyed by Anthony Burgess’ use of language. As is clear from glancing at any paragraph, Burgess invented his own dialect for the teenage hoods in his story. He called it Nadsat, which derives from the “-teen” termination for the Russian numbers from 11 to 19 (for example, thirteen is trinadtsat; eighteen is vosemnadtsat). In other words, it’s “teen talk,” and it’s largely based on Russian. My Ballantine edition came with a very helpful glossary of all the Nadsat terms used in the text. In effect, I learned my first hundred or so Russian words from this book before I had even commenced formal study of the language.

Burgess’ achievement in concocting Nadsat has been justly praised. Besides being a brilliant linguistic construct in itself, it plunges you into the world of Alex and his “droogs” (friends) in a visceral and vivid manner. Nadsat also serves to demarcate the criminal world of Alex from the sphere of “respectable” society.

Nadsat is the largest part of the linguistic texture of a future world that is close enough to our own to be both plausible and scary. A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, but clues in the text suggest a setting a couple of decades into the future. There are tantalizing hints that history turned out differently – Alex and his droogs frequent a pub called the Duke of New York, and the Russian linguistic influences, as well as the obvious socialism of the setting, with its enforced employment and “Dignity of Labour” murals, suggest a Sovietized Britain. There are references to a character called “Will the English,” which seems odd for a novel set in England.

Also worthy of note are the elements of the dialect that have nothing to do with Russian. These include mock-Shakespearean locutions (“What, then, didst thou in thy mind have?”), stiff-sounding formal phrases (“it stands to reason”), elaborations of common expressions (“beyond the shadow of a Doubting Thomas”), apparent baby talk (“appy polly loggies” for “apologies”), some instances of Cockney rhyming slang, and the notorious incantatory phrase “O my brothers.”

These elements contribute to the realism of Burgess’ invention, because in-group dialects usually derive their vocabulary from multiple sources. An example is the Argentine slang known as Lunfardo, based mostly on the speech of Italian immigrants, but borrowing from other sources, including French, Gaucho dialect, and Portuguese.

Having said that, like a lot of things in speculative fiction, Nadsat only works if you don’t think about it too much. Its main implausibility is a vocabulary that is too large and contains too many seemingly random elements. Certain terms are used very frequently, but there are others that appear only once or twice in the entire course of the novel and, what’s more, don’t seem to add anything to the overall effect. I’m thinking about such words as “yeckated” (“drove”) and “sloochatted” (“happened”), the sort of boring basic verb that an in-group would tend to overlook, unless it had some special meaning for them.

There are also seldom-used terms that I wish had been used more often. Examples are “zvook” (“sound”), and “choodessny” (“wonderful”), simply because of their attractiveness as sounds. However, they are only used once or twice in the entire book. And Burgess missed an opportunity to use a number of evocative-sounding Russian words to spice things up. I’m thinking of possible terms like “choosh” (from чушь, “drivel, twaddle, rubbish”) and “choot-choot” (from чуть-чуть, “a bit, a tad”). “Stop talking choosh,” “I’m choot-choot fatigued”: potential improvements to Nadsat.

What’s more, no clear explanation is given as to how this teen dialect arose. Alex’s only aesthetic interest is an obsession with classical music (particularly Beethoven); he doesn’t seem like much of a reader – in fact, he likes to destroy books when he gets the chance. Nor is it clearly explained why a group of English teenagers would have been exposed to so much Russian. One character mentions “subliminal penetration,” a phrase with a certain Cold War resonance. It still doesn’t explain why this dialect is limited to disaffected teenagers.

Nadsat isn’t the only strange dialect referred to in the book. Browsing in a record store, Alex meets two girls who pepper their speech with words like “swoony” and “hilly.” Alex notes that “these young devotchkas had their own like way of govoreeting.” When Alex is sent to prison, he comments on the “old-time real criminal’s slang” of one of the inmates.

When I read the novel, I was glad to have the glossary of Nadsat terms. Later, however, I discovered that the inclusion of such a glossary was contrary to the author’s wishes – Burgess wanted his readers to figure out everything from the context. It would have made for a denser, more confusing, but possibly more immersive reading experience. In any case, it’s too late for me to find out. But at least one reader found Nadsat a bit too dense for his purposes.

When reading A Clockwork Orange, you have the opportunity to go back and work out puzzling slang words at your leisure. That option doesn’t exist when you’re watching a film (or at least it didn’t in the days before home video). This is presumably why, when filming A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick made numerous changes to Nadsat, reducing its original complexity.

In the book, Alex describes his sentencing as follows: a “starry very grim magistrate in the lower court govoreeting some very hard slovos against your Friend and Humble Narrator.” In the film, this becomes “some very hard words spoken against your Friend and Humble Narrator.” Alex’s local hangout in the book, where he drinks doped-up milk with his droogs: “the Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto.” Kubrick’s version: “the Korova Milkbar sold milk-plus.”

In the book, Alex reacts to the sight of a drunken old man with these words: “I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy…whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real starry like this one was.” Kubrick “normalizes” the language like this: “I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.” While Kubrick does preserve some Nadsat words throughout the film, the language becomes more comprehensible to the cinema audience, while losing some of its distinctiveness.

As a cinematic auteur, Kubrick was legendary for his meticulousness, which bordered on fanaticism (one short scene in Barry Lyndon required something like 77 takes). So it’s a bit of a shock that he allowed Malcolm McDowell to botch the pronunciation of Nadsat on a few occasions. Alex pronounces “oomny” (smart) as “omni,” and more than once he changes “krovvy” (blood) to “kroovy.” Kubrick allowed another strange oversight to occur. The novel contains an explanation of the title A Clockwork Orange – it is a book being written by the dissident writer F. Alexander, who is brutalized by Alex and his droogs in an early scene. However, the film omits this detail, leaving the title a mystery to those who know only the film.

In keeping with the principle that changing one thing usually means you have to change another, the simplification of Nadsat forced Kubrick to make at least one important plot change. In the book, F. Alexander, encountering Alex for the second time, recognizes him by his way of speaking (“strange, strange, that manner of voice pricks me. We’ve come into contact before, I’m sure we have”). In the film, where Nadsat has lost much of its strangeness, the writer (now called simply “Frank”) recognizes Alex when he hears him doing a lazy rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain” in the bathtub – the same song Alex had sung when beating and kicking Frank in that earlier scene.

Kubrick altered some other things as well. In the book, the treatment Alex undergoes leads to his being nauseated by any music that he hears. In the film, the only music that makes him sick is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which also happens to be his all-time favorite piece. It is easy to understand why Kubrick made this change – Burgess (who was a composer as well as a writer) stuffs his narrative with descriptions of music, including works by made-up composers like Friedrich Gitterfenster, Claudius Birdman, Adrian Schweigselber, and “the Danish veck Otto Skadelig.” Such a panorama of largely fictional musical achievement would be difficult to recreate on the screen.

And cinematic plausibility presumably dictated another significant alteration. In the novel, one of the more shocking details – which we discover about one-third of the way in – is that Alex is only fifteen years old. When the British version of the book ends, he is a mere eighteen. A teenage psychopath played by an actual teenager would have been problematic for a number of reasons; as it happened, the role was played by Malcolm McDowell, already in his mid- to late-20s when the film was shot. But this leads to another peculiar oversight: when Alex’s mother leaves for work, she tells him to get out of bed because “you don’t want to be late for school, son!” Perhaps in this world of the future, it’s normal to be a 27-year-old high school student; but from my point of view, it looks like someone wasn’t paying sufficient attention to detail.