What's the meaning of "a heteroglossic text"?

Heteroglossia (multilanguagedness) is a term which originated with Mikhail Bakhtin and particularly in his work "Discourse in the Novel." Heteroglossia refers to the multiple variations of languages and ideas/perspectives within those languages. Another way of thinking about it is: Heteroglossia is all the different ways people speak to one another: and how each appropriates each other's speech/ideas and attempts to make it their own. These different ways are different because of class, gender, culture, dialect, accent, demographics, and so on. A peasant will speak a certain way to another peasant, and he/she will speak a very different way to a city official. The complexity of these different ways of speaking reflect all the baggage of culture, economics and so on.

Looking at a novel as heteroglossic is to avoid looking at it as a monoglossic or single-ideological/authoritative work. Heteroglossic method is very much in the postmodern theory: democratization and pluralization of meaning, inter-relatedness, hybridity, and intertextuality of culture in languages. The method is decentralizing what is a formal unity: the novel - by recognizing the complex of multiple ideologies as manifested through different ways of speaking.

The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia. ("From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," Bakhtin, 67)

Bakhtin referred to the authoritative (and sometimes oppressive - The State) unification as centripetal; and to heterology as centrifugal: A 'spinning out' or decentralizing of a monoglossic text. I think Bahktin said that it is easier for poetry to appear, because of its form, in a monoglossic way. I think that most, or all, texts are heteroglossic and any attempt to make a text monoglossic is usually an attempt to present one ideology, or one worldview. But for a text to be called heteroglossic in literary analysis, I bet it would be a text that calls attention to its own heteroglossia. Bahktin had used Charles Dickens to illustrate this.

The different ways and forms of speaking are never neutral, Bakhtin says. To use Derrida's phrase, they are 'always already' linked to cultural meanings and ideologies.