Bakhtin's Heteroglossia and The Evolving Language

I really like what Bakhtin has to say on "Discourse in the Novel," but I particularly like his idea of heteroglots. He describes this as the instance where language undergoes a change based on present conditions, and in the novel, heteroglossia is "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." (Bakhtin 324) What I find most interesting is the idea of an unstable language. Bakhtin says:

"Thus at any given moment of it's historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given bodily form. These 'languages' of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying 'languages.'" (291)

So basically, the changing conditions that cause language to change as well can be traced to socio-ideological factors. The social norms are constantly changing, the way a society is expected to speak and behave is always in transition. Therefore, the heteroglots are the marked differences between the current and the former social ideals. I definitely appreciate this notion, because it means that language is not constrained by a definitive definition of a word, or even by a "symbol" as Richards and Ogden would suggest. Language is evolutionary and can, from one symbol, actually diverge to represent another "symbol." I think the idea is that we, as a culture, use culturally relevant things in order to determine just what something means or stands for. A society's unique experiences or encounters with different issues will largely influence their "jargon," as Bakhtin point out (291). I can't help but think of the way the word "gay" has evolved, although maybe it's a poor example. From elation, to derogatory, and then there's still the somewhere in between definition that's not intended to be offensive, but still is a label?? I imagine it would extremely confusing for a 19th century person suddenly coming to life and having to adapt to our strange jargon and cultural dialect, which would use words they might be used to in an entirely different manner. It's worth thinking about, the concept that language is self-evolving, "adapting" to it's environment.