Heteroglossia is the English translation of the Russian term "raznorechie" coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary critic of the early twentieth century. From the Greek roots "different" (hetero) and "tongues" (gloss), the term attempts to account for the tendency of language toward ever-greater differentation, on the level of national speech, individual uses of language, and even particular speech acts. In his work Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin writes::


Translated? Bakhtin, rather than regard language as a unitary system and a fixed method of attaching words to the things they describe (e.g., "cat" = cat), he considers instead that language serves as a dynamic snapshot of the social and intellectual group that uses it (e.g., "cat" = jazz musician to a 1940s hipster). Words can over time, have not only differing but sometimes diametrically opposed meanings; understanding the differences of the meanings can be the crux of understanding a given social language, individual way of talking, or particular utterance.


Individuals who make use of language do so in this context of multiplicity. Their conscious or unconscious choices about how to combine, revise, and "spin" the linguistic material they encounter around them are the means through which they produce orginal works of authorship, their own unique identity, and their particular web of social identifications.

Heteroglossia is intimately linked to the concept of intellectual property through its role in producing individual "creative consciousness" in the midst of borrowed language. Authors of what we call "intellectual property" create using pre-existing materials, given through the luck of national birth, local education, and individual experience, among other such influential accidents. the luc. A writer's writing is, first and foremost, in the "language" of his or her country, then education and experience, not necessarily in that order.

Though an author's original work may be attributed to him or her, and through its unique re-combinations of pre-existing material may in fact be something new under the sun, it is nevertheless the product of a highly derivative, synthetic process. This may be more true than ever today - particularly with the dawn of the internet, as more and more is created and spread farther than ever before, these patterns of influence on creativity are thousands of times more inescapable than they were even in Bakhtin’s time.

Mikhail Bakhtin is the name invariably attached to the term "heteroglossia," which he coined - a somewhat ironic bit of counter-evidence to his claim for the non-originality of all creations (though perhaps a confirmation of his sense that bits of language can be more-or-less "owned" by virtue of a writer or group's particularly influential use of it).

Rebecca Moore Howard's writing on student plagiarism and "patchwriting" draws heavily on Bakhtin's notion of consciousness created through the assembling of the language of others (see the I-Prop page on cryptomnesia). And the notion of creative borrowing examined in the work of anthropologist Rosemary Coombe and New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is likewise indebted (whether they know it or not) to Bakhtinian thought.

A 21st-century undergraduate's particular dialectical use of certain words can exemplify the "stratification" of a supposedly unitary language like English. She may  use the word "bank" to mean "money" rather than the larger financial institution that holds it. Similarly, she may use "script" (normally meaning the text of a play) as an abbreviation of "medical prescription." She surely knows the more typical meaning of these words, but her usage is indicative of the language of her social grouping, and her claim to identification with that group comes through "owning" this particular use of language.

Internet linking can be regarded as one form of heteroglossia specific to our current moment, an idea explored on a hypertext project titled the Indicare Lexia. Essentially hypertext is a real and visual example of the meanings and cross-meanings of words and language – linking individual words to other sites, meanings, and interpretations could not better emphasize the diversity of language today that Bakhtin observed and predicted.

back to basic concepts page

Home | UWP | GWU