At the heart of it is the view that language is a dialogic phenomenon. One of the obvious ways in which different voices may be simultaneously present in a piece of discourse is when someone else's speech is quoted, reported or alluded to. Especially in the work of Bakhtin's close associate, Valentin Voloshinov , one finds the idea that a truly social linguistics must concentrate on the historically and diatypically shifting tendencies in the report of speech as imbued with ideology.
Discursive practice is essentially heteroglossic .
This view can be applied in a number of ways. For instance, one may examine how in a social worker's narrative of a case of child abuse one finds traces of medical discourse, administrative discourse, troubles talk, therapeutic discourse. Click here for an example analysis. A dialogic view of language goes entirely against the Saussurean idea that language can be viewed as an autonomous system which can be described by recourse to relationships between signs which are internal to the system. A dialogic view on language prioritises texts which are impure in their make-up.