One of the main features on which there seems to be a great agreement among researchers is that German modal particles are mostly used in oral language. However, after reviewing the literature ever since one of the most representative works in this field was made and after considering the characteristics that are derived and that define this group of words as a distinct group from other grammatical categories, we observe, on the one hand, that the relationship between German modal particles and intonation is an aspect hardly developed and, on the other hand, that this relationship is analysed taking into account a corpus of written data. In this paper we purpose to change this point of view and recover the initial assumption. German modal particles would have to be analysed taking into account their natural context where they are used and, in order to do that, they would have to be studied exploring the interrelations between several oral codes, because it is there where their different modal meanings arise.