‘Firthian linguistics’ gets its name from John Rupert Firth (1890–1960), the main proponent of an approach to language, developed at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. This essay deals with issues of Firthian linguistics that are closely related to pragmatics. It seems to the authors that Firth, as he was further developing Malinowski’s ‘ethnographer’s perspective’ that an “utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation”, was de facto taking the initial steps in a new field of linguistics, i.e. pragmatics. From a pragmatic perspective, the most prominent Neo-Firthian approach is Halliday's Systemic Functional linguistics.