This essay discusses the development, main features and areas of inquiry of ethnography of speaking. It has been the thrust of the ethnography of speaking to map the cultural and linguistic relativity of language use, universal features were of secondary or no concern. A primary area of current inquiry is that of speech acts. Verschueren (1989) has provided a useful cross-language scheme for the study of ‘linguistic action verbs’, such as ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’, with important heuristic potential for inquiring cross-culturally into the distinctive means of speaking and their meanings, because it provides a universal framework for identifying and, subsequently, comparing and contrasting, the particularities of local communicative resources.