Heteroglossia

Heteroglossia refers to the multivoiced nature of language. For studies of discourse, narratives, and text, heteroglossia and associated concepts provide a sophisticated sociological approach to analysis. Utterances and texts are populated with a multitude of social languages attached to specific ideologies or perspectives. Examples include professional jargons, peer group argots, and political or religious discourses. These “sociolects” are characterized by the social [Page 389]stratum of speakers associated with particular social groups that are not equal in power or prestige. One sociolect may be authoritative and hegemonic, suppressing other voices, but all societies contain multiple social languages, some of which are engaged in opposition and struggle.

For Mikhail Bakhtin, who theorized heteroglossia, every utterance is multivocal, containing both a social language and a speech genre. A speech genre is not necessarily associated with a particular social group, but with particular forms of utterance and speech situations. Speech genres include poems, parodies, scholarly treatises, sermons, biographies, prayers, confessions, life stories, and everyday conversations. Genres enable creativity, but they also contain rules and structures that place parameters on utterances. Utterances, then, are shaped by social languages and genres, but they are also dialogic, containing at least two voices: the speaker's voice and the voice of the social language through which this is ventriloquated. The speaker as author incorporates the words and voices of others, but the utterance becomes the speaker's own when it is populated with his or her own intentions and accent and is appropriated for the speaker's own purpose.

An analysis of text or utterances from this perspective examines the sociolects and speech genres used and how the author combines different voices—words with different socioideological histories—into a unique utterance. Analysis also focuses on how utterances are socially charged and dialogically engaged with past, present, and future audiences and how they position the speaker vis-à-vis others. Anthropological linguists have used Bakhtin's ideas of heteroglossia, voice, utterance, and dialogism in the analysis of conversation and performances and the social work that speaking accomplishes. Others have employed these concepts to examine relations between social and personal facets of human development, especially the development of identity in cultural worlds. From this perspective, individuals' utterances are analyzed for the ways in which speakers orchestrate voices from their sociocultural worlds to create distinctive images of self and to envision their (future) social positions. To do these kinds of analyses, sociolinguistic diacritics or textually inflected ethnographies of speaking are useful.