In the society of George Orwells 1984, the government manage to control their population by reducing the vocabulary available to them. The governments aims to reduce the ammount of words in the native language of "NewSpeak", and by doing so, limit the thoughts of it's population. According to the government, by reducing the vocabulary available to the general populace, you can prevent them from thinking certain thoughts (for example, if we removed all of the words for good and just said "good" "more good" "very good") and by doing this make it physicaly imposible to commit what is called in NewSpeak "thought crime", (thought crime is a felony where a party member thinks something which is against the party's teachings, or against the party, or big brother himself.) and hence ultimitley make the idea of a rebellion impossible, and hence remain in power.

My question to you is this: by limiting/controling the language available to people, can we control their thoughts?

Maybe, but limiting and controlling language is impossible anyway, unless you have like 10,000 people.

I'm speaking of a hypothetical situation here. and if you've ever read 1984 (which I recommend you do, its bloody fantastic!) you'll see that they do indeed have that many people.

Quote from walker90234

My question to you is this: by limiting/controling the language available to people, can we control their thoughts?

Depends on the words. We already have this, to an extent, there are words in other languages which have meanings that English speakers wouldn't even consider describing with one word -- in Icelandic, "gluggaveður" means weather that looks nice from inside, but might be unpleasant if you went outside. There's no simple Italian equivalent for the word "creepy". And many more examples.

But, you can still conceptualize those ideas, and convey them with what words are available to you -- I don't know if there's a point where you can limit the language to the point of non-conceptualization of certain ideas, but I guess it might be possible.

Quote from walker90234

I'm speaking of a hypothetical situation here. and if you've ever read 1984 (which I recommend you do, its bloody fantastic!) you'll see that they do indeed have that many people.

Hypothetical suppositions about situations that could never exist are irrelevant.

I haven't read the book.
If the government runs the schools and then teaches the kids a select vocabulary, and have the next generation of the government taught in a privae system?

Schools didn't teach black people AAVE but they speak it anyway. They made those words up themselves to express certain situations or entities.