The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as professionals working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.

Preface; A note on conventions; 1. Introduction; 2. The sociolinguistics of interpersonal communication; 3. Social network and language shift; 4. Conversational code switching; 5. Prosody in conventions; 7. Socio-cultural knowledge in conversational inference; 8. Interethnic communication; 9. Ethnic style in political rhetoric; 10. Postscript; Bibliography; Author index; Subject index.