Dialogism is the principle that every utterance is oriented toward other utterances — that meaning is constituted through the encounter between voices, not within a single speaker’s intention.
The concept is central to the Bakhtin Circle’s semiotic theory. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that no word arrives in a vacuum. Every word has already been used by others, carries their accents and intentions, and enters a field of existing discourse that shapes its meaning. To speak is always to respond — to prior utterances, to anticipated counter-responses, to the social languages that saturate every word with evaluative orientation [@bakhtin_DialogicImagination_1981].
Dialogism is not a property of some utterances (conversations, debates) as opposed to others (monologues, declarations). It is the constitutive condition of all language use. Even an apparently monologic text — a scientific paper, a legal statute, a sermon — is dialogic: it responds to prior positions, anticipates objections, and takes its meaning from the discursive field it enters. Monologue, in Bakhtin’s analysis, is a socially enforced reduction of dialogue, not its absence.
Heteroglossia
The social expression of dialogism is heteroglossia — the coexistence of multiple social languages within a single national language. A doctor’s discourse, a merchant’s discourse, a priest’s discourse, a peasant’s discourse: each carries its own worldview, its own evaluative accents, its own system of signs. The novel, for Bakhtin, is the literary form that orchestrates heteroglossia, giving voice to multiple social languages without reducing them to a single authorial position.
Multi-accentuality
Valentin Voloshinov extended the dialogic principle into a theory of the sign as the arena of ideological struggle. Every sign carries multiple ideological accents held in tension. A ruling class attempts to make the sign “uni-accentual” — to fix its meaning and present that fixity as natural. But in periods of social upheaval, the multi-accentuality of signs becomes visible: the same word means different things to different classes [@voloshinov_MarxismPhilosophyLanguage_1929].
Related terms
- sign — the entity whose meaning is constituted dialogically
- semiosis — the dynamic process that dialogism describes at the level of the utterance
Source: Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, 1981. Voloshinov, Valentin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Seminar Press, 1973 [1929]. See also Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007.