"Speech genres" is what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the formal, stylistic, expressive, and dialogical organization of our everyday utterances. For the present book, the manuscript he wrote in 1953 on the problem of speech genres has been newly translated and supplemented with notes, preparatory materials, and two additional fragments that are presented in German translation for the first time. The texts demonstrate how Bakhtin revisits linguistic debates from the 1920s and complements them with his theses on the other, dialogical, and polyphonic word. In doing so, he also formulates - at least implicitly - a contribution to the relationship between dialogicity and performativity.