Heteroglossia

In Mikhail Bahktin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” he coins the term heteroglossia. So we start by breaking this term down. Hetero means “other” or “different, where the combining word gloss- can mean “word” or “speech,” like the term glossary. Heteroglossia: Other speech.

This is pretty much what Bahktin gets to in his essay. Heteroglossia refers to use of different languages, where languages can be the point of view of the narrator and the different dialogue of the characters. By creating a novel with heteroglossia, the text is able to be readable to many people and not just one particular group.

“Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permit’s a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different (always more or less dialogized.)…-this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel (Bahktin 263).

For example I use heteroglossia in my own life. As a Starbucks barista, I use one language with my customers, "Hello! How are you? What can I get for you today? Would you like anything to eat with your latte today Jim?" Then I switch to a different mode of language more suitable (and less fake) when talking to my coworkers: "Spencer can you check the bathrooms? Tuck in your shirt." My language becomes more choppy and I change my tone as if I was talking to one of my friends. The language I use with my mother is COMPLETELY different than the language I use around my father, and the language I use around my friends is EXTREMELY different than the language I use around my one year old son. We change our speech so that listener better understands us.


Living Without Heteroglossia:


In the comic, the platypus and the woman have nothing in common, and are using two differnt modes of language, both speaking on different subjects. This would be an example of a world without heteroglossia.


Bahktin's idea of heteroglossia is a mode of formalism that we can use to interpret the text. "The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the genreal characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language" (Rivkin 3).







Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.