In the absence of appropriate medication and the long‐awaited vaccine, information‐oriented,people‐centered outreach strategies are our best hope for restricting the spread of HIV in particular communities. These strategies will be effective only if practitioners who employ them understand how people talk about AIDS and AIDS‐related issues in those communities and focus their outreach efforts in terms of those concerns. There are common themes to such discourse, and the discussion in this paper shows how techniques of linguistic analysis can be used to identify them.