Conversation is one of the most fundamental of all human activities. While most people take this form of interaction for granted, people who stammer often approach it with fear and trepidation. This article identifies stammering as a distinctly social event and highlights the relative neglect of the issue within the discipline of sociology. Drawing upon the work of George Mead and Erving Goffman we suggest that a distinctly sociological approach offers specific insights into stammering as an effect of social interaction.We argue that the strategies that people who stammer employ when passing and covering and the accounting practices that all individuals use in social interaction to define the difference between stammered and non-stammered speech are of sociological interest insofar as they provide valuable insights into the interaction of self and society, the tenuous distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and the conceptual boundaries of disability.
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