Bakhtin and the Battle for Meaning
A Dialogic Perspective on Language
I first came across Mikhail Bakhtin whilst writing a paper arguing that bivalency was one factor that would (forever?) make France’s language policy of banning the use of English words in favour of a French equivalent (marketing/la marquetique; weekend/la fine de semaine) unenforceable. In his essay Discourse on the Novel Bakhtin discusses linguistic simultaneity which was the basis for the concept of bivalency further developed by the linguist Kathryn Woolard.
Bakhtin never set out to be a linguist. His concerns were broader: philosophy, literature, culture. His ideas, however, have profoundly shaped how we understand language today. While Saussure gave us the structure of language and Chomsky its generative power, Bakhtin gave us its struggle. For him, language is never neutral. It is always contested, always shaped by history, and always part of an ongoing dialogue. Words do not simply carry meaning, they carry voices, echoes of past usage, tensions of authority, and expectations of response.
At the heart of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language is dialogism, the idea that meaning is not created in isolation but emerges from interaction. Every utterance, every sentence spoken or written, exists in relation to something that came before and anticipates something that will come after. This makes language dynamic, shifting, and deeply social.
The Dialogic Nature of Language
Dialogism turns away from the static models of language we see in structuralist theories. Where Saussure treated language as a closed system of signs, Bakhtin saw it as an open-ended conversation. Even when we write a book, give a lecture, or send an email, we are responding to an existing discourse, to past debates, to imagined counterarguments. No utterance stands alone.
In this, Bakhtin shares ground with Wittgenstein’s language games and forms of life. Wittgenstein argued that meaning is determined by how language is used in particular contexts—what he called forms of life. Words do not have meaning in isolation; they gain meaning through use. A legal contract, a joke, a prayer, they all follow different rules of interaction. Bakhtin would agree but goes further: language is not just rule-bound but ideologically charged. Meaning is not merely shaped by usage but by struggle, by competing voices, by historical tensions, by power dynamics.
If Wittgenstein’s language games provide a useful metaphor, Bakhtin would remind us that the game is never fair. Some voices are louder than others, some have institutional backing, some are silenced altogether. Dialogue, for him, is not a neutral exchange but a battlefield of ideas, where meaning is contested and renegotiated.
Heteroglossia: The Multiple Voices of Language
Language is never uniform. It is stratified by class, region, profession, age, ideology. A doctor speaks differently from a factory worker; a politician’s speech is not the same as street slang. Bakhtin called this heteroglossia: the coexistence of multiple speech styles and social dialects within a language.
This perspective aligns with sociolinguistics, particularly the work of William Labov and Lesley Milroy, who studied how language varies according to social networks. Labov showed that social class affects pronunciation in New York English; Milroy demonstrated how close-knit communities maintain their linguistic distinctiveness. Yet while these scholars focused on variation as an observable phenomenon, Bakhtin saw it as deeply ideological. Different speech styles are not just markers of identity; they reflect struggles for legitimacy. Some ways of speaking are seen as ‘correct,’ others as ‘inferior.’ Heteroglossia is not just about linguistic diversity—it is about linguistic conflict.
This is why Bakhtin might challenge Labovian variationist sociolinguistics. By quantifying how often a variable appears in different social classes, Labov’s approach treats language as measurable. Bakhtin would argue that language cannot be reduced to statistics because meaning is historically and politically contested. A dialect is not simply a variant, it is a site of struggle between dominant and marginalized voices.
Carnivalesque and Ferguson’s Diglossia
One of Bakhtin’s most famous ideas comes from his study of medieval folk culture: the carnivalesque. In the carnival, social hierarchies are inverted: peasants mock kings, the sacred is ridiculed, and the ‘low’ temporarily overthrows the ‘high.’ Bakhtin saw this as more than just entertainment. It was a moment where dominant discourses were challenged, where unofficial voices pushed back against authority.
This idea bears a striking resemblance to Charles Ferguson’s diglossia, which describes the relationship between high (H) and low (L) varieties of a language. In Arabic, for example, Standard Arabic (H) is used in formal settings, while colloquial dialects (L) are spoken in daily life. The high variety carries prestige; the low variety is often dismissed as improper or substandard.
But where Ferguson saw this as a stable linguistic relationship, Bakhtin would argue that no hierarchy is ever fully stable. The ‘low’ variety is not just passively subordinate, it resists, it mocks, it shapes the high variety in return. Just as carnival speech subverts official discourse, colloquial speech constantly pushes against linguistic authority. The existence of slang, humor, and parody reminds us that no linguistic hierarchy is ever absolute.
The Utterance and the Prague Circle
For Bakhtin, the utterance is the basic unit of meaning, not the word, not the sentence, not the phoneme. What makes an utterance unique is that it is always addressed to someone. It is not just a piece of language; it is a social act. This aligns with the Prague Circle linguists, particularly Roman Jakobson, who categorized the functions of language (expressive, poetic, referential, etc.).
But where the Prague Circle focused on the functional aspects of language, Bakhtin focused on its ideological weight. An utterance is never neutral. It carries the voice of its speaker, the expectations of its listener, and the history of its past uses. Every time we speak, we do so within a web of prior dialogues.
This is why Bakhtin would likely challenge formalist approaches to pragmatics, such as speech act theory (Austin, Searle). While speech act theorists classify how statements function (e.g., commands, promises, apologies), Bakhtin would argue that these classifications miss the social struggle behind them. A promise is not just a promise; it is shaped by who is speaking, who is listening, and what histories of trust or power are at play.
Language as a Battlefield
What unites all of Bakhtin’s ideas is a rejection of language as a stable, neutral system. Unlike structuralists, who mapped out the internal rules of language, and unlike Chomsky, who focused on generative grammar, Bakhtin saw language as a battlefield of meaning. Every conversation, every text, every utterance exists within a dynamic struggle of voices, some dominant, some resistant, all shaping each other in an ongoing dialogue.
Would Bakhtin critique modern linguistics for its tendency to categorize and measure language? Probably. He would argue that linguistics too often ignores the ideological struggles embedded in speech. By focusing on variation, syntax, or pragmatics in isolation, we risk missing the larger picture: that every word spoken or written carries history, power, and the expectation of response.
Language is not a system; it is an argument. And as long as people speak, that argument will never be settled.
©Antoine Decressac — 2025.
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One such battlefield today, it could be argued, is the debate about what the term WOKE actually means.