What is the fictional teenage slang spoken by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange? It is Nadsat.
Nadsat is the invented argot used by Alex and the teenage gang members in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation also uses the vocabulary, allowing Alex's narration and conversations to sound strange without making the dialogue entirely unintelligible.
Burgess built Nadsat mainly from English with Russian-influenced words, while also drawing on Cockney rhyming slang, biblical language, and invented expressions. The name comes from the Russian suffix equivalent to the English “-teen,” linking the argot to its teenage speakers. Words such as droog, moloko, and horrorshow are among its best-known terms.
Nadsat is sometimes called a language, but it is more precisely a fictional register or slang argot rather than a complete natural language. It is also not the same as Newspeak, George Orwell's controlled language in Nineteen Eighty-Four, nor Polari, a real cant associated with British subcultures.