The contributions to this volume, focusing on examples from a variety of cultural locations, demonstrate that speech practices can be understood from a culture-internal, ethnopragmatic viewpoint. Employing "cultural scripts" and semantic explications, the papers investigate a broad range of issues, such as speech acts, interactional routines, terms of address, facial expressions, jocular irony, phraseological patterns, discourse particles, etc., in diverse languages inckuding English, Australian English, Singapore English, Chinese, Colombian Spanish, Japanese and Ewe.