This paper aims to reexamine the sociolinguistic concept of "linguistic community", taking multilingual work situations into account, in order to determine whether such a sociolinguistic concept can be defined without reference to the concrete situations where interactions are realized. The study shows that the norms governing linguistic uses and interpretations in a given multilingual work setting do not necessarily correspond to the norms that prevail in the multilingual society at large. The work setting should thus be defined as a socialization setting, where linguistic norms are negotiated in a dynamic process.