Heteroglossia
“Hetero-” meaning “different” and “-glossia” referring to “tongues."
Heteroglossia acknowledges the coexistence of a variety of styles of speaking within the same language.
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Example
In the United States for example, there are a variety of linguistic dialects for the English language. People speak differently in the South than they do the Midwest, Northeast and West Coast. In the South alone there are different inflections and intonations in someone’s language in Florida vs. Alabama, and two friends in Florida may have preferences.
Prompt
Listen to a conversational segment of a podcast and type out a section to feel how the voices in the conversation sound different from each other.
Then write a poem as if two people are speaking to each other—whether it’s building an idea, arguing or wondering about current events. Focus less on how they sound in the first draft, but in revision, change the style of one of the voices a little more than the other based on speech patterns you observed in the radio segment.
Alternately, collaborate with a friend. After choosing a topic together, have each person write as one character and then piece it together afterward. How do you sound different from each other?
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Resource written by:
Nadia Alamah
