There is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. Here's a sampling
from The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael
Holmquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holmquist. 1981. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996. 
  
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types 
(sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual 
voices, artistically organized.  The internal stratification of any 
single language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, 
professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and 
age groups, tendentious languages, languages of authorities, of 
various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the 
specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour, (each 
day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases) -- this 
internal stratification present in every language at any given moment 
of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the 
novel as a genre.  The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality 
of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by 
means of the social diversity and speech types [raznorecie] and by the 
differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.  
Authorial speech, the speech of narrators, inserted genres, the speech 
of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with 
whose help heteroglossia [raznorecie] can enter the novel; each of 
them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of 
their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized).  
These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and 
languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and 
speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social 
heteroglossia, its dialogization -- this is the basic feature of the 
stylistics of the novel.  [262-263]