īakhtin proposes that these stratifications of language represent distinct points of view on the world, characterized by their own meanings and values. When heteroglossia is incorporated into the novel, it is 'another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way'. This diversity of voice is, Bakhtin asserts, the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre. Linguistics, insofar as it is an attempt to systematize language, must always ignore or conceal this reality.Īny language, in Bakhtin's view, stratifies into many voices: 'social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions'. Heteroglossia is thus 'the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance' and that which always guarantees 'the primacy of context over text.' It is an attempt to conceptualize the reality of living discourse, where there is always a tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces, between the imposition of systematic order and the prior condition of freedom from it. Every word uttered, in any specific time or place, is a function of a complex convergence of forces and conditions that are unique to that time and place. Heteroglossia is the presence in language of a variety of 'points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values.' For Bakhtin, this diversity of 'languages' within a single language brings into question the basic assumptions of system-based linguistics. Bakhtin, translated and edited by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson.

The term translates the Russian разноречие, which was introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе, published in English as 'Discourse in the Novel.' The essay was published in English in the book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. The term heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single ' language' (in Greek: hetero- 'different' and glōssa 'tongue, language'). Coexistence of multiple points of view within a language

Bakhtin the dialogic imagination