When we set out to compile a handbook for the vast field of intercultural discourse and communication, we knew that we wanted to have something that was in some sense really a handbook. A book you keep returning to to jog your memory about how to do something, or remind you not to forget something. In Intercultural Discourse and Communication (IDC), that means having a perspective that is both theoretical and practical, that keeps in focus both the discourse and the communication, and that is truly intercultural (and, although not in the title, multicultural and cross-cultural, the definitions of which we will not dwell on, but are discussed in several of the chapters, especially Chapters 1 and 2). Our audience is thus an eclectic one: people who will read to understand the state of a field that really isn’t a single field, students just learning how to do analyses and also to theorize their ideas, and we hope also people “in the trenches” doing work in intercultural situations.

The first two parts comprise an overview handbook, containing chapters that provide historical context as well as theoretical perspectives. Our experience teaching also suggests that readers will be interested in surveys of different kinds of discourse phenomena that repeatedly arise as problematic in intercultural discourse contact. So the third part forms a mini-handbook on these phenomena: turn taking, silence, indirectness, and politeness.

Some of the most useful things in any handbook are examples, so the fourth section is that: several examples of researchers analyzing particular cross-cultural situations. Such a section could of course fill a library (or we could just refer the reader to a journal), but we have asked a number of researchers with varying interests in diverse cultural combinations and situations to provide a few. These studies of course do not exhaust the types of situations or the possible cultural combinations (an impossible task), but we have tried to make sure there is not a heavy focus on Anglo-American contexts, and we have also tried to include diverse ways of conceiving the analysis. Finally, we know that for most people IDC is not a theoretical endeavor but a practical one, and so we have included some overviews of how the study of IDC has been applied in different domains.

This handbook can be used in a number of ways, including for a course in IDC. However, we would encourage anyone so using the handbook to supplement it with either some more original readings, such as those contained in our reader Kiesling and Paulston (2003) or in a textbook on intercultural or cross-cultural communication (such as Bonvillain 2003 or Scollon and Scollon 2001) or linguistic anthropology (such as Foley 1997 or Duranti 1997). Journals that contain important IDC articles include the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, the Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society, Language and Intercultural Communication, Multilingua, and Pragmatics.

We would like to thank a number of very patient people who have helped this volume become a reality. First and foremost are the authors of these contributions. Some have been waiting literally years to finally see their chapter in print, and some have graciously stepped in at the last minute to fill a gap that suddenly appeared. The team at Wiley-Blackwell has put up with us graciously, and we are grateful for their patience and persistence. Specifically, we want to thank Danielle Descoteaux, Rebecca du Plessis, Julia Kirk, Sue Leigh, and Eunice Tan. We have also insisted on thanking those who have filled normally invisible roles in book production but who are essential, our proofreader Glynis Baguley and our indexer Zeb Korycinska. Last but certainly not least, we want to acknowledge that this volume would not have happened if there had not been mentors who over the years helped us along, some of whom have contributions in this volume.

REFERENCES

Bonvillain, Nancy. 2003. Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages. 4th edn. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthro­pology. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguis­tics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foley, William A. 1997. Anthropological Lin­guistics: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kiesling, Scott F. and Christina Bratt Paulston (eds.). 2005. Intercultural Dis­course and Communication: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.

Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Wong-Scollon. 2001. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.