Roberts et al. (2001) define the topic area and methodological orientation of interactional sociolinguistics as follows: […] the ways in which styles of communicating index social identity and the need for a method which examines the fine-grained detail of interaction.This definition nicely captures the two formative lines of work. On the topic side, the tradition finds its origins in the earlier sociolinguistic work of John Gumperz, in particular his ethnographic work. Casting the net as widely as possible, interactional sociolinguistics can be said to be heir to, or to have developed in conjunction with, the ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, microethnography, symbolic interactionism, and cognitive anthropology (with clear Batesonean influences). The tradition has earned itself a place in most sociolinguistics textbooks (e.g. Holmes 2008) and many manuals for the study of pragmatics and discourse. Interactional sociolinguistics originally pursued two related tenets. On the one hand, it traces the influence of taken-for-granted sociocultural presuppositions on the way in which interpersonal communication works. On the other hand, it investigates the processes by which aspects of social identity are communicatively produced. In this perspective, the interactive negotiation of meaning has become an important focus of attention. As the tradition matured, a third tenet developed, viz. the search for a convincing balance between the micro-analysis of small moments of human interaction and the wider social structures which confine (and define) their occurrence. Favorite topics are, quite in line with these theoretical objectives, encounters in socially defined settings, whether institutional or not, and whether intercultural or not. The major contribution, in a pragmatic perspective, is the reorientation which interactional sociolinguistics has forced researchers to undergo in relation to the notion of ‘context’.The empirical work is centered around prosody which, when analyzed from the perspective of contextualization, can be shown to play an important role both in interpretation and in the maintenance of conversational coherence, and around other often metalinguistic features. These features, which would be called ‘metapragmatic’ in Silverstein's terminology, are described as ‘contextualization cues’ in the interactional sociolinguistic tradition. The applications of interactional sociolinguistics in especially the area of intercultural communication did not go unnoticed, nor unchallenged. The true target of interactional sociolinguistics amounts to no less than the construction of an adequate theory of social action involving language use. In the process, a complete pragmatic theory of how levels of explicit and implicit meaning interact to generate socially significant meanings, would be needed. A central integration into the ambitious program of a full awareness of variability as a mode of being – the real trigger for the emergence of interactional sociolinguistics in the first place – may require more work of the ‘crossing’ and ‘stylization’ type, as well as new ways of looking at forms of multilingualism as language systems in their own right.