Acceso usuarios
Josiane Boutet
In this article, I give a historical overview of scientific approaches to language use at work. While early studies that were carried out since the nineteenth century first by laypersons and then by linguists (lexicologists, terminologists, and specialists of professional discourse) focused on the use of specific words at work, a new avenue for exploration was introduced in the 1980s by the network ‘Language and work’ (Langage et travail), which proposed an ethnographic, interactional, and interdisciplinary perspective. Based on fieldwork carried out in collaboration with the members of this network and with ergonomists, I was able to propose the concept of ‘the language part of work’ (la part langagière du travail). This concept describes the spoken and written language that characterise actual work practices, which can be described from a micro-level perspective by means of observations of specific workplaces as well as from a macro-level perspective regarding general socio-linguistic processes.
