Burgess, a polyglot who loved language in all its forms, was aware that linguistic slang was of a constantly changing nature, and knew that if he used modes of speech that were contemporarily in use the novel would very quickly become “dated”. His implementation of Nadsat was essentially pragmatic; he needed his narrator to have a unique voice that would remain ageless while reinforcing Alex’s indifference to his society’s norms and to suggest that youth subculture existed independently of the rest of society. Nadsat is in fact not so much a language as a register or argot. The words are inflected after English patterns regardless of from what language they may have originated.