Verbal interaction inherently involves the participants assuming roles of speaker and hearer, whether speaking in turn or not. Coined by Bernard Pottier (1992), the term “interpreter” is proposed for these roles, emphasizing understanding and reacting effectively. While “listener” and “hearer” are more common, they understate the cognitive effort involved. The role of the enunciator is to be understood, while the interpreter must grasp the message, identifying communicative intentions. The complexity of interpretation, often underestimated, involves navigating potential pitfalls, sometimes resulting in misunderstandings with varying consequences. In intercultural communication, especially in “unequal encounters”, managing misunderstandings can be challenging, and communicative failure may occur. To mitigate this, familiarity with the cultural values of interlocutors is crucial, requiring efforts to bridge cultural differences in regular intercultural interactions. This chapter presents Wierzbicka’s (2003) four foundational postulates in intercultural communication and introduces Peeters’ six research protocols for applied ethnolinguistics: ethnolexicology, ethnometaphorology, ethnophraseology, ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, and ethnoaxiology. These postulates can be used for validating certain cultural concepts, explicating specific semantic definitions using NSM and proposing cultural scripts to explain the cultural behaviours identified. Since applied ethnolinguistics has affinities with a certain number of other theoretical frameworks, the chapter also includes a brief presentation of cultural linguistics by Farzad Sharifian, ethnopragmatics by Cliff Goddard, and cognitive ethnolinguistics by Jerzy Bartmiński.