Locke and Bakhtin

"These languages live a real life, they struggle and evolve in an environment of social heteroglossia." This line stood out in Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel." It is profound to think of language as living a life, and I can clearly understand this assertion. In its interaction with people, language goes through stages and changes. This is the idea of heteroglossia. I think that Bakhtin's piece works well to answer some of the questions that arose from Locke's "From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding." We asked, "Does language have agency apart from a speaker or interpreter?" My initial reaction given Bakhtin's "living language idea" is that language does have agency. It is alive and active, however, I still feel that it is alive and changing in the hands of its users. Language needs to be used in order to evolve.

Bakhtin and Locke also agree that language has imperfections. Locke explains that “the imperfection of words is the doubtfulness or ambiguity of their significations, which is caused by the sort of ideas they stand for” (Locke 817). This is seen when a word “does not excite in the hearer the same idea which it stands for in the mind of the speaker” (817). This seems related to Bakhtin's idea of stratification. Bakhtin explains that in a particular shared language, there is specific content and concrete value judgment. Shared languages are “directly intentional—they denote and express directly and fully… but for those not participating in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, as typifactions, as local color… things, limited in their meaning and expression” (289). According to Baktin, some of the limitations of language can be attributed to stratification. People who belong to the same shared language group probably have a better chance of understanding each other and the nuances in their language.

While Bakhtin seems to be criticizing literary analysis, he also has some things to say about language itself, and those ideas coincide with those presented by Locke.