Includes contribution; E. Ardener - Introductory essay; social anthropology and language; Part I, Social anthropology, language, and sociolinguistics; H. Henson - Early British anthropologists and language; R.H. Robins - Malinowski, Firth, and the context of situation; D. Hymes - Sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking; J.B. Pride Customs and cases of verbal behaviour; Part II, Multilingualism and social categories W.H. Whiteley - A note on multilingualism; E. Tonkin - Some coastal pidgins of West Africa; N. Denison - Some observations on language variety and pluralingualism; D. Crystal - Prosodic and paralinguistic correlates of social categories; Part III, Social anthropology and language models; E. Ardener Social anthropology and the historicity of historical linguistics; G.B. Milner - The quartered shield; outline of a semantic taxonomy; C. Humphrey - Some ideas of Saussure applied to Buryat magical drawings; Material derived from Association of Social Anthropologists sponsored conference on linguistics and social anthropology held at Brighton, April 1969.