The semiotic changes which characterise the present and which are likely to characterise the near future cannot be adequately described and understood with currently existing theories of meaning and communication. These are based on language, and so, quite obviously, if language is no longer the only or even the central semiotic mode, then theories of language can at best offer explanations for one part of the communicational landscape only. Theories of language will simply not serve to explain the other semiotic modes, unless one assumes, counterfactually, that they are in every significant way like language. Nor will theories of language explain and describe the interrelations between the different modes, language included, which are characteristically used in the landscape of Multiliteracies, of always multimodal semiotic objects-the ‘texts’—of the contemporary period.