Interlocutors

An interlocutor is a person who participates in a dialogue or conversation. The term applies to any participant who engages in producing and interpreting utterances and who contributes to the negotiation of meaning. Interlocutors can be speakers, listeners, or alternatingly both within a single exchange, and their goals may range from information exchange to persuasion or social bonding. The relationship between interlocutors—including their social identities, power relations, and shared context—shapes language choices, turn-taking, formality, and nonverbal cues.

In linguistics and discourse studies, interlocutors are central to pragmatics and conversation analysis. Researchers study how interlocutors establish reference, manage topics, repair misunderstandings, and align with each other’s goals. The concept distinguishes between the speaker as the person producing an utterance and the addressee or audience as the recipient, but both are considered interlocutors within the same dialogue.

In education and technology, the study of interlocutors informs language teaching and the design of dialogue systems. Language learners benefit from interaction with supportive interlocutors, and tutors or peers can facilitate pragmatic development. In artificial intelligence, conversational agents model interlocutors to interpret user input, maintain context, and generate appropriate responses.

Etymology: from Latin interloqui, meaning “to speak between.” The plural interlocutors refers to multiple participants in conversation.