This paper studies the use of the term educación bilingüe intercultural (ebi) (‘intercultural bilingual education’) both in specialized discourse as well as in non-specialized documents from the perspective of a proposal for a terminology which is at variance with the traditional point of view, oriented towards terminology normalization and prescription. The focus here is on communication: according to this approach, terms are considered as units of natural language with a capacity for reference, but, like words, they can also have other functions (expressive, conative, etc.), and can be used in different communicative settings. This analysis allows us to explain the term intercultural bilingual education in discourses produced in different socio-cultural situations, to observe the degree of competence the producers of such discourses have of such a term and to describe the formal and conceptual variation of the term according to the users and the type of text.