Heteroglossia and identities of young adults in Bangladesh

• The paper takes a Bakhtinian approach to understanding the language practices and identities of a group of young adults from an English-medium education background in Bangladesh.
• The analysis reveals that the young adults use linguistic features as a way of borrowing voices and expressing a variety of intentions and meanings.
• Their language becomes heteroglossic because of the aspirations, struggles, and ideologies that have impact on their voices.
• The paper also sheds light on the fluidity of the language and identities of these young adults within the social and cultural dynamics of globalisation.
• The paper ultimately problematises the essentialised and stable notion of identities based on class, gender, and nationality.

The paper takes a Bakhtinian approach to understanding the language practices of a group of young university students from an English-medium education background in Bangladesh. These participants speak in stylised English and Bangla with exaggerated pronunciation, specific patterns of stress and intonation, and paralinguistic features of voice for a variety of intentions and meanings. When they use mockery, parody, enticing and exotic ideas, and linguistic and non-linguistic resources from Western media, they accentuate their education and class-based identity and dissociate themselves from the prescripted identity of Bangladeshi woman. This paper unravels the micro- and macro-dimensions of their heteroglossic language practices and sheds light on the process by which language and identities are continually made and remade within the historical, political, social, and cultural dynamics of the context.