Heteroglossia is the coexistence of distinct linguistic varieties, styles of discourse, or points of view within a single language (in Greek: hetero- "different" and glōssa "tongue, language"). The term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie: literally, "varied-speechedness"], which was introduced by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], 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. Bakhtin, translated and edited by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. 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. 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 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. According to Bakhtin, linguistics—to the extent that it operates on the presumption that language is a system—inevitably suppresses the fundamentally heteroglot nature of language as it is lived and experienced by human beings in their day to day realities.
Languages as points of view Any 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". This diversity of voice is, Bakhtin asserts, the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre. 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". Bakhtin proposes that these stratifications of language represent distinct points of view on the world, characterized by their own meanings and values. In this view, language is "shot through with intentions and accents", and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time. To Bakhtin, words do not exist until they are spoken, and in that moment they are imprinted with the signature of the speaker. Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires speakers or authors to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect in which they will speak. Separate languages are often identified with separate circumstances. The prose writer, Bakhtin argues, must welcome and incorporate these many languages into his work.
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