Lucien Febvre's discussion of whether or not it was possible for the concept of "atheism" to exist in France during the early modern period depended heavily on a very similar argument – that the language required to express the thought did not exist until later.
I covered his enquiry and the conclusions that he drew in an earlier response. You might like to check that out while you wait for fresh answers to your query:
Was everyone religious in the old days, like Medieval Times, or were there irreligious people?
One of my favorite recent articles (Kusha Sefat 2020, "Things and Terms", *International Political Sociology* 14) asks this question related to post-Revolution, Iran-Iraq war-era Tehran. The extent to which totalitarian is a viable category there, or anywhere, is debatable in my opinion, but the article gets at the gist of your question. I like the article because it is more complicated than a simple policing of language. Sefat is an anthropologist, but as a historian I've found his thinking really helpful in understanding things I work on also.
Sefat traces changes in language via a longitudinal study of wide-circulation newspapers, looking at the frequency of a variety of key liberalist concepts in everyday use. He pairs this with film and other things that depict the changing material environment over time as well. His argument is that language consists of symbolic signs, but your everyday material environment also carries symbolic and other signification too, and it creates unconscious/pre-cognitive knowledge through affect (influencing your body, and creating certain feelings that you then translate into emotions and sentiments, in culturally-conditioned ways). So Sefat pays attention to how the state (a) performed its presence in the material environment with new revolutionary kinds of objects and images and (b) blocked or removed objects that would signify individualism and plurality, even subconsciously, as opposed to self-sacrifice in a revolutionary and wartime collective. By paying attention to these things and pairing that analysis with the longitudinal study of language, Sefat shows that the revolutionary state effected cultural change in language (a noticeable decrease in the circulation of liberalist concepts) as much through the state's impact on the material environment, as through concerted efforts to police concepts through language. Or, really, that the two necessarily complement each other. To sum it up, he says (from the abstract):
"the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became fixed at the level of multitudes. This blocked public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of the revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini."
The argument goes a little further than that, and says that because of the specifics of the things and terms in play, Khomeini's importance was raised to a metaphysical status, transcendent of politics, effectively making any other kind of politics not only impossible, but almost unthinkable/unimaginable, because of the radically transformed environment (both linguistic and material). So I imagine that should be getting close to what you're looking for in totalitarianism.
In any case I thought Sefat's would be a good argument to reproduce here, because the way a history of concepts works in real everyday life (and in 1984) contains even more dimensions than language, and the argument makes us ask about how physicality and emotions shapes our thinking and expression.
Also, I promise that I am not myself Kusha Sefat, just an admirer of his work.
So this isn't exactly the answer you're looking for, but I want to look at this from the other direction: what language policies influenced the creation of Newspeak?
To answer this, I'm gonna largely draw from Howard Fink's 1971 article 'Newspeak: the Epitome of Parody Techniques in "Nineteen Eighty-Four"'. In it, Fink lays out three sources of inspiration for Orwell's language: Basic English, an artificial language created by CK Ogden; Interglossa, an international language created by Lancelot Hogben; and The Road to Serfdom, a book by FA Hayek. For this answer, I'm just going to focus on Ogden and Hayek.
Basic English was a project developed by CK Ogden in the 1920s as a way of simplifying English to create a more international language. Like many people before and after him (as I've written about before), Ogden felt that if everyone was able to speak the same language, it could make global life much easier.
Unlike most of those other projects, rather than building a new language, Ogden sought to take an existing language and simplify it. Basic English (which I regret to inform you is a backronym that stands for British American Scientific International and Commercial English) reduces the vocabulary of the English language, stripping it of confusing and non-essential elements, and simplifies its grammar to make it easier for non-English speakers to learn. Basic would therefore be accessible to people living in both the Anglophone and not Anglophone worlds, and in turn, everyone would share a second language.
Meanwhile, The Road to Serfdom is a book by philosopher Friedrich Hayek, published in 1944. I can't really get into its argument too deeply, but a (perhaps overly-reductive) summary is "free markets are good and central planning leads to totalitarianism". In Chapter 11, "The End of Truth", Hayek discusses the tactics that would-be fascists use to manipulate people's understandings and opinions and beliefs, and argues in part that to get people to buy into the totalitarian values is to make people think these are the same values that they already subscribe to. He dives deeper (p. 161-163):
And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.
The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word liberty. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed it could almost be said—and it should serve as a warning to us to be on our guard against all the tempters who promise us New Liberties for Old—that wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. […]
If one has not oneself experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion which it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates. It has to be seen to be understood how, if one of two brothers embraces the new faith, after a short while he appears to speak a different language which makes any real communication between them impossible. And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.
In the early 1940s, Orwell had been an advocate of Basic English. He promoted it on the BBC, hoping it'd unify people from different linguistic backgrounds. However, his tune changed later in the decade, as he becomes skeptical of the influence governments could have if they could manipulate language (and enforce those rules) to such a degree as Ogden attempted. These fears were likely influenced at least partially by Hayek's writing: Orwell had written a review of the book for the Observer in 1944, where he was critical of Hayek's stance about free markets, but nevertheless admits some weariness of the development of despots.
In 1946, Orwell published his essay "Politics and the English Language" where he discusses how flowery and imprecise language gets used to make indefensible ideas seem more palatable. Repetitively using familiar euphemisms and metaphors sorta softens the blow of a message, and desensitizes people to the horrors they are communicating; he writes
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy […] A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
If you're familiar with the language, you can see how all this is bubbling up inside Orwell for him to eventually generate Newspeak. If you're not, then conveniently enough, in 1984 (published in 1949) Orwell wrote an appendix to the book outlining the language, "The Principles of Newspeak".
The purpose of Newspeak is to restrain people's thought by limiting the language people use to express themselves. Perhaps inadvertently, it utilizes a strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, which argues that a language's structure can affect how its speakers think; while the weak version of the hypothesis suggests that language can merely influence thought, the strong (and not as well-supported) version argues that language can determine what people are capable of thinking, and if one cannot express a thought in a language, they are incapable of holding that thought at all. In 1984, the totalitarian government seeks to create a language where that has no vocabulary that can understand any remotely dissident thought, and therefore people would be literally incapable of treason. As he explains,
This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.
Newspeak is essentially an exaggeration of the things we see in sources like Ogden and Hayek. The reduced lexicon and stripped-down grammar is an extreme version of Basic English's simplification, while the manipulation of meaning for fascist purposes is clearly reminiscent of what Hayek was warning about. I can't remember exactly where this comes from, but I recall somewhere in the book, Newspeak is described as a making people talk in a very staccato-like manner, droning through words systematically while not really processing anything, which is a very hyperbolic version of that quote from Orwell's "Politics" essay.
While these influences weren't as large-scale as they are in the book, they were nevertheless things actually going on in the world that influenced Orwell when making the language.
New Religious Movements (NRMs), many of which are colloquially referred to as "cults", have historically employed tightly controlled language as part of their overall control strategies. I'll be talking about Scientology as my primary example. Scientology has never achieved anything as total as the end result of Newspeak proposed by Orwell in his The Principles of Newspeak (thanks to u/jelvinjs7 for linking that!). However, many of the principles underlying Newspeak are used to shape Scientologists psychologically and ideologically. This is by design, as the control of language was a priority of founder L. Ron Hubbard in the mid-20th century.
First, let me pick out a key few principles of Newspeak that will be relevant to our discussion.
Now, I will look at how Scientology was designed to employ each of these principles.
1) Linguistic limitations on the discussion of dissenting ideologies
Scientology employs a few different terms to label dissenting thought. Most of these go straight back to Hubbard's early writings of the 50s and 60s, since Hubbard's word (policy or Source) is the highest doctrine in Scientology. Entheta (enturbulated theta) is anything published which is critical of Scientology. Scientology teaches that a Scientologist who consumes entheta will become enturbulated. This is an undesirable state of being in which the reactive mind of the theta (soul) has become disturbed and destructive. Scientology teaches that the reactive mind is something which must be controlled through good Scientology practice - this is the only way to become Clear, or free of disturbed thoughts or physical sensations. An enturbulated theta is therefore considered a destructive threat, not only to an individual, but to others around them. Anyone who poses a potential threat of enturbulation is a PTS (Potential Trouble Source). An enemy of Scientology is an SP (Suppresive Person). Good Scientologist behaviour is called KSW (Keep Scientology Working), while enturbulating behaviours are known as out-KSW. Scientologists are encouraged to report out-KSW behaviour by writing KRs (Knowledge Reports) on fellow Scientologists.
Here's how this functions in practice with a (just barely) historical example. During her marriage to Tom Cruise in the 1990s, Scientology officials were displeased with Nicole Kidman. She was considered PTS because her father was a practicing psychologist, considered a suppressive act in Scientology. The organisation's leadership tried to facilitate the breakdown of the relationship. After Kidman's divorce with Cruise in 2001, he retained custody of their two children, who were then put through courses on how to identify a PTS or an SP. Their daughter was, around that time, anecdotally reported as referring to their mother Kidman as a "f***ing SP". The exact nature of Kidman's "crimes" against the group did not matter when they could be conveniently reduced to concepts like entheta, SP, PTS, out-KSW.
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