 ‘Cha-cha’ is a word in the English language (yes, imported from Spanish). In some semantic theories, the meaning of that word just is the social kind cha-cha: the semantic value of the word is identical with the social category. This may or may not imply that language plays a key role in social ontology. On a direct-reference theory of meaning (see Soames 1987, Kaplan 1989, Recanati 1993), it does not. That theory argues that we encounter the kind cha-cha in the world—a kind that is presumably socially constructed—and then connect the word ‘cha-cha’ to that kind. The inclusion of that word in our language does not have any metaphysical bearing on the category.