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This article discusses various issues related to linguistic issues in interviewing in social work practices. The social worker depends on the client's speech obtaining a history of the problem, in making differential and social diagnosis, and in assessing levels at development and indications of social dysfunction. It is in intake interview that appropriate language is most crucial in social work, because this interview provides the information on which the agency's determination of the case lies and the client, if given the choice, chooses to engage himself or herself with the agency. Linguistic problem areas which may develop in interviewing center on several major aspects of language use in social work practice. The first area concerns language differences between the worker and the client. Language problems may interfere with communication between the worker and the client. The first occurs between people who do not speak the same languages and the second involves the use of different dialects of the same language by the interacting people.

The article discusses linguistic subcultures in social work practice. The article argues that social workers should realize that people from cultural backgrounds different from their own would actually perceive the same situations and objects differently than they do. In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language not only reflects cultural differences but that it determines them. The forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by patterns learned early, of which he is mostly unconscious. The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. An illustration of linguist Benjamin Lee Whorl's hypothesis is his claim that different concepts of time and space are dictated by different languages. European languages, like English, force speakers to view objects or events as either having been, being, or as they will be in contrast, in the Hopi Indian language tenses discriminate a period that extends up to and includes the present, a future, and a generalized timelessness governing things that have always been true. Subcultures use their own particular dialect of a language, including jargon and idioms which effectively exclude outsiders from full participation in that subculture.