The word “heteroglossia” is made up of Greek components — “hetero-” meaning “other or different” and “glôssa” meaning “tongue, language” — but the concept comes to us from Russia. It’s a translation of the Russian word “raznorečie,” which was coined by philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in an essay called “Discourse in the Novel” (translated from Russian). The concept of heteroglossia is that there’s a diversity of voices and perspectives in a novel. The word can now be applied to any sort of multicultural or otherwise diverse situation.