All social interaction involves communication; it is difficult to make an explicit differentiation between sociolinguistic and social interaction rules. For heuristic purposes, I propose a tentative distinction between: (1) social interactional rules as those governing social behavior within social structural contexts having such features as, for example, role, hierarchy, exchange requirements, etc.; and (2) sociolinguistic rules governing the use of resources of spoken and written language within sets of social structural constraints. I propose a further distinction between system-specific rules and rules which may be common to all societies (or sociolinguistic systems) and provide illustrations for each type of rule at each level of possible generality.