We talked about how hard it can be to say the word “hella” if you’re new to northern California, but what are some other, or more serious examples of what Bakhtin’s talking about when he writes this?: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intention, it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.” (p.294) Why is it so hard to make others’ words your own? Think of regional accents, styles of speech (even classroom English at UC Berkeley!), new or foreign languages, etc. along with individual words…


This goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning of class; how literacy relates to specific discourses. Within a single language, there are accents, dialects, slang, jargon etc. This is because language is a tool, and such a tool must adapt to the user's needs.
This is why it's so difficult to make others' words your own. We're from different regions, and we adapt to different social settings; even if the regional difference is as minute as southern and northern California. Such separation of language within language occurs to an even greater level when it comes to academic discourse.
For example, a linguist cannot use the jargon of a chemist or vice versa. A person who works in bussiness can't use the language of a lawyer. Even age groups have these separations of minute linguistics (a seventh grader will speak differently from a ninth grader).
As an Arabic major, these differences in language are very pertinent to me. Each country within the middle east and near east has their own dialect of Arabic, all of which derive from Quranic Arabic. All the dialects are quite similar, but they also have characteristics depending on the nature of the region. For example, the Egyptian dialect has over one hundred words for camel. This does not occur in the Moroccan or Jordanian dialect. This is because Egypt's vast deserts have shaped the culture into valuing the camel a great deal.
Another interesting example of adopting other peoples' words occurs in the middle east as well, specifically in Morocco. Morocco and much of North Africa was colonized by the French, thus this dialect is practically half French and half Arabic. In this case, it was not difficult for the Moroccans to make the French's words their own (probably because of years of unwelcome colonization and forced standardization of French).

Growing environment also affects the types of words you use. For example, each state, generally, has their way of pronouncing the word often. In California, people pronounce it without the "t," but when I lived in Minnesota and New Jersey, this was just plain bad English.

It's really interesting how many variations of a single language there can be. But, looking at the enormous diversity of regions, especially in the United States, along with individual diversity and culture, one can really see why this happens and why it's not easy to take on another person's manner of speach.