Heteroglossia

How it is used

Use for social varieties of speech, such as official, religious or everyday language; several national languages are not required.

Example sentences

1. The novel's heteroglossia brings the clerk's official phrases into conflict with street speech.

   Two social registers carry different ways of understanding the same events.

2. Our analysis of heteroglossia follows how the borrowed legal language changes inside a joke.

   A formal register gains a new meaning when another voice reshapes it.

Common collocations

• novelistic heteroglossia
• analyze heteroglossia

Related terms

• dialogueThe words that characters speak to each other in a story, play or film; in prose it is usually shown in quotation marks.
• dictionA writer's or speaker's choice of words, especially as it shapes tone, style, formality, and meaning.

More terms: Narration and Point of View

• narrator
• point of view
• narrative
• first-person narrator
• omniscient narrator
• unreliable narrator
• stream of consciousness
• focalization
• free indirect discourse
• literary persona
• narratee
• simultaneous narration