Mikhail Bakhtin....Language

“Language-like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives- is never unitary.” (674) Mikhail Bakhtin states here that language is never meant to take on only one form, it is meant to be used and abused. Sure, the words we speak are recycled but we re-invent them every day by doing something as simple as choosing how we greet people (if we greet them at all). Bakhtin even gives us the ways in which our language can be put to good use by putting it into genres, “specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, etc.” (675) Through criticism for example, we show the ever changing format in which we use our language, by simply changing our specific points of view on certain topics and seeing how those can change in the blink of an eye. People cannot stop talking about Tiger Woods now, everyone decides that he is guilty of doing something heinous, but this time next year, this time last year, it will be, and was different. And that is what Bakhtin alludes to in this article and I have to say that I agree with him in every sense of the word. Words aren’t meant to be trapped forever, no one can own a language, language (point of view) is always changing, which is why Bakhtin mentions that the words we speak today will have nothing to do with the words we speak tomorrow and spoke yesterday. An example to support this comes from the “A changing language situation: The decline of Dyribal, 1963-1989” by R.M.W. Dixon. This article focuses on the decline of the use of the Dyribal language in which at one point had 5,000 but soon saw a declined to about a solitary few, “I have worked fairly steadily on these tasks for just over a quarter of a century. During this period, I have the language decline from a state in which there was an abundance of speakers who could supply the information I sought to one in which there is just one good consultant left for each of three dialects, with no one to go to for a second opinion. The language has died at a faster rate than I could record it.” (Dixon, p.183) This quote proves what Bakhtin states is true, language is not meant forever. It is basically just a way to communicate and people are of a fickle nature which means that as hard as one may try, language will change whether we like it or not. As Bakhtin even mentions the way people can create their own language inside their own sphere. So now he even opens up to the fact that language doesn’t even have to make literary sense in order for it to be language it just has to be understood.

Works Cited

Dixon, R.M.W. “A Changing Language Situation: The Decline of Dyirbal, 1963-1989.” Language in Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 183-200 Published by: Cambridge University Press (WEBCT) 24 February 2010.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Maichael. Victoria, Aus.: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. 674-685. Print.