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"This paper explores the issue of speech and discourse, little developed as yet in the social sciences of religion. Although theoretically almost undetermined, speech and discourse are crucial issues in the study of religion and the empirically recurrent expressions of religious life (especially in the social sciences such as sociology and anthropology, under discussion here). Despite their evasiveness in the understanding of religious behavior, speech and discourse however brought about a revolutionary perspective owing to a paradigmatic shift which led the social sciences of religions to reposition their objects from epistemological realism to constructivism, and their theoretical approaches from a linguistic to a pragmatic approach. This pragmatic turn in sociology and anthropology is linked to other epistemological and theoretical turns (political, poetic, performative and "" actantiel"") and profoundly reworks the model of a discourse previously subjugated by issues of meaning, social and linguistic determinations of religious language, in favor of a discourse socially situated and symbolically productive. We offer here some of the landmarks of this conversion."