The field of professional sociocultural community development is precarious. The term itself seems to go out of use in some of the countries in which it had become established (Spain, Italy...). In the countries where its bases are more stable, the actors who refer to it feel the need to defend it. The positioning of the field is indeed delicate because it built itself in complementarity and sometimes in opposition with nearby fields historically better established. This article shows in what language which guides us reveals and feeds the processes of constitution and legitimization of the identities and the professional cultures and which are the stakes for sociocultural development, social intervention and popular education. Postulating that language is a vector of construction of the representations of the world, the author defends the hypothesis that the evolution of the discourses shows movements of a collective thought and all the practices which ensue from it.