Popular medical texts from the early modern age to the present are drawn upon to show how an intermediary communicative world has developed between science and everyday life and how the transfer between specialist language and the scientific world on the one hand and everyday language and the everyday world on the other is managed in such texts. It transpires that non-specialist communication is oriented both to science and the world of the everyday, albeit in different ways. With a view to clarifying their theoretical status, the varieties thus identified are related to the system of varieties in German. Non-specialist communication is defined and distinguished from other forms of knowledge transfer.