This volume is rooted in the conviction that something has been missing from our understanding of language, and that established lines of linguistic research will not – even cannot – fill the gap. Whether one's concern is with the analysis of language as a purely scientific subject, or with the role of language in practical affairs, questions arise that are quite outside the declared scope of the conventional disciplines which claim an interest in language. Patterns and functions of speech are recognized that are not taken into account in grammars, ethnographies, and other kinds of research. Differences in the purposes to which speech is put and the ways it is organized for these purposes are observed, whereas the scholarly literature seems to consider only the ways that languages and their uses are fundamentally the same. In recent years, work to remedy this situation has come to be known as the ethnography of speaking.

The ethnography of speaking has had a relatively short history as a named field of inquiry. It was called into being by Dell Hymes' seminal essay of 1962, which drew together themes and perspectives from a range of anthropological, literary, and linguistic scholarship, and brought them to bear on speaking as a theoretically and practically crucial aspect of human social life, missing from both linguistic descriptions and ethnographies, and on ethnography as the means of elucidating the patterns and functions of speaking in societies.