ABSTRACT
Issues of ethnicity and interethnic interaction have been extensively investigated across social science disciplines for several decades. This essay presents an overview of some of the concepts that are prominent in the literature and proposes a conceptual framework in which many of the existing concepts can be integrated from a communication viewpoint. The current description of interethnic communication is grounded in some of the metatheoretical assumptions of pragmatism and systems theory, which emphasize the inseparability and interdependence of the context and the behavior of communication in any given interethnic encounter. Based on this perspective, interethnic communication is conceptualized in the form of a transactional matrix that consists of the behavior (encoding and decoding) and three layers of the context: the communicator, the situation, and the environment.
