The development of contemporary labour can be featured by the increasing use of language in many productive activities, mainly in the service area, where most jobs involve dialogues and oral communication. These activities can be considered as language jobs held by a new professional group, the "language workers", as I have named them. By analysing and registering some dialogues in a call center in France, I came to the conclusion that telephone operating is a linguistic activity.
dialogues; call centres; sociolinguistics; language at workplaces; linguistic job