In Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, Alex and his friends use the slang language Nadsat.
Nadsat is a fictional teenage argot used throughout Alex's narration and conversations. Burgess built much of it from Russian-derived vocabulary, mixed with English slang and invented terms. Words such as droog, meaning friend, and moloko, meaning milk, make the fictional future feel linguistically distinct without requiring a full separate language.
The name Nadsat comes from the Russian suffix used in numbers from eleven through nineteen, comparable to the English ending “-teen.” Burgess used the vocabulary to create distance between readers and the novel's violence while also showing how youth culture can challenge adult authority.
Readers sometimes confuse Nadsat with Newspeak, the controlled language in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is an official political project designed to restrict thought, whereas Nadsat is primarily an informal youth slang used by Alex's social group.