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Sociolinguistics has become an internationally-recognized field, with, however, a variety of positions as to what « socio » signifies. The authors examine three of these : the social nature of language; interdisciplinarity; and the theoretical relationship between language and society. They go on to develop the concept of critical sociolinguistics, proposed by M. Heller in 2002. They apply this concept to the study of the workplace, conside-red here as a « key situation » (Gumperz).