Speech Genres (Bakhtin)

Speech genres are, in Bakhtin's framework, the shared forms that organize communication within specific domains of human activity. Every profession, every social context, every recurring situation develops its own genre: characteristic ways of beginning and ending, typical lengths, expected tones, conventional structures. The business email is a speech genre; so is the academic lecture, the medical consultation, the first date. Learning to operate in a domain means internalizing its speech genres — not just vocabulary but the social logic of what can be said, what goes without saying, what must be said with care. Speech genres are normative (they establish what counts as competent performance) and creative (they provide the constraints against which genuine originality becomes possible). Bakhtin distinguished primary genres (everyday, oral, dialogic) from secondary genres (written, formalized, often monologic) and argued that the novel's achievement is its incorporation of primary genres into secondary form, maintaining the living responsiveness of speech within the architectonic structure of literature.