In the Anglophone linguaculture, ‘stranger’ and ‘acquaintance’ are fundamental social categories around which norms of social interaction are enacted and established (Ye, 2019). These two categories, stranger and acquaintance, however, may not have direct equivalents in other linguacultures owing to the different priorities placed on social groupings across linguacultures (cf. Ye, 2017b). Despite the primacy of these two social categories in the Anglophone linguaculture, their meanings have not been examined in detail. This paper fills this gap by offering an in-depth, corpus-assisted ethnolinguistic study of these two concepts, aiming to reveal not only their culture-specific meanings but also their associated interactional norms. In so doing, the paper contributes to material development in intercultural competency training.