Death must be managed, cognitively, so that we can function, and practically, to maintain the health of the living. Deaths happen in predictable patterns, once diagnosis is made; it may be fast, slow, or halting in its progression, and chronic conditions may take years for eventual decline. These can be described as dying trajectories and cultures usually have expectations based on scripts derived from worldview, experience, and health epistemology. Communicating across cultures brings challenges of language, but also of worldview and expectations. Relaying the bad news of a terminal diagnosis is never easy, but becomes even more difficult if a culture has proscriptions against mention of death. Informed consent becomes particularly burdensome when patients’ cultures are more collectivistic and/or agency is not individualized. Arts provide fertile bodies of information about how cultures think about and approach mortality.

This chapter examines cross-cultural and intercultural approaches to sociopragmatic dimensions of language use. After an initial introduction, the first main section clarifies and discusses some key concepts and issues, including ‘culture’ and ‘context’, as they have been conceptualized within cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; the distinctions between cross-cultural and intercultural research perspectives; and context and the interconnections between context and culture.It then proceeds to review some of the main research findings deriving from cross-cultural work on speech acts and cultural scripts, as well as cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on sociopragmatic aspects of intercultural communication. It includes authentic samples of data that illustrate a number of the above issues. Finally, the chapter reflects on the main theoretical challenges and opportunities associated with addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of language use from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, providing a critical summary and identifying promising areas for future research.