Heteroglossia

Martina Björklund
Åbo Akademi University
Table of contents

In the 1980s and 1990s, dialogism, voice/double-voicing, and polyphony were the foremost Bakhtinian notions among Western linguists, whereas heteroglossia turned up more rarely in linguistic studies. However, the beginning of the 21st century witnessed an increased interest in heteroglossia, especially among sociolinguists and other scholars interested in multilingualism. Heteroglossia is the English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) notion of raznorechie, which was introduced in the essay “Slovo v romane”/“Discourse in the Novel” written in 1934–1935 (English translation in Bakhtin 1981). In this essay Bakhtin discusses his view of linguistic diversity and stratification, and how they relate to the use of words/discourse in novels. Bakhtin was, however, not the first or the only one in the Soviet Union of the time to pay attention to the social stratification of language. As pointed out by Mika Lähteenmäki (2003, 2004, 2010) and discussed in detail by Craig Brandist and Lähteenmäki (2010), the idea of the social stratification of language was widely discussed in Soviet linguistics at the beginning of the 1930s, for instance, by Lev Iakubinskii and Viktor Zhirmunskii. Nonetheless, it is Bakhtin’s thinking and his notion of raznorechie in its English translation of heteroglossia that has attracted the attention of contemporary linguists interested in living language as a social and ideological phenomenon. The translated term heteroglossia has actually attracted more attention and is more widely used by linguists than the Russian original, which to this day is most often used in literary analyses.

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