Sociolinguistic : Sociolinguistic and the Sociology of Language

Some investigator have found it  appropriate to try to introduce a distinction between sociolinguistic and the sociology of language. In this distinction, sociolinguistics is concerned with investigating the relationship between language and society with the goal being a better understanding of the structure of language and of how languages function in communication ; the equivalent goal in the sociology of language is trying to discover how social structure can be better understood through the study of language. e.g how certain linguistic features serve to characterize particular social arrangements. Hudson (1980) has described the difference as follows :  sociolinguistic is the study of language in relation to society in order to find out as much as we can about what kind of thing language is  and in the sociology of language we reserve the direction our interest. The view I will  take here is that both sociolinguistics and the sociology of language require systematic study of language and society if they are to successful. Moreover, a sociolinguistic that deliberately refrains from drawing conclusion about language made in the course of sociological research. So while it is possible to do either kind of work to the exclusion of the other, I will be concerned with looking at both kinds.
Consequently, I will not attempt to make the kinds of distinctions found in Trudgill (1978). He tires to differentiate those studies that he considers to be clearly sociolinguistic in nature from those that clearly are not, for, as he says 'while everybody would agree that sociolinguistic has something to do with language and society, it is clearly also not concerned with everything that could be considered "language and society ". The problem, therefore lies in the drawing of the line between language and society and sociolinguistics. Obviously. different scholars draw the line in different place. Trudgill argues that certain type of language studies are almost entirely sociological in their objectives : they seem to fall outside even the sociology of language. Included in this category are ethnomethodological  studies and work by such people as Bernstein. For Trudgill, such work is definitely not sociolinguistic, however defined, since it apparently has no linguistic objectives.
According to Trudgill, certain kinds of work combine insights from sociology and linguistic. Example of such work are attempts to deal with the structure of discourse and conversation, speech acts theory, studies in the ethnography of speaking, studies in the sociology and certain practical concern such matter as kinship systems, studies in the sociology of language e.g, bilingualism, code-switching diglossia and certain practical concern such as various aspect of teaching and language behavior in classrooms. While Trudgill consider all such topics to be genuinely sociolinguistic, he prefers to, however, to use that term in a rather different somewhat narrower sense. In another place he says that such concern are perhaps better subsumed under anthropological linguistic, geolinguistic and the social psychology of language and so on.
For Trudgill there is another category of studies in which investigators show a concren for both linguistic and social matters. This category consist of studies which have a linguistic intent. Studies of this type are based on empirical work on language as it is spoken in its social context and are linguists. These studies are just another way of doing linguistic. Included in this category are studies in variation theory and linguistic change and the seminal figure is William Labov. According to Trudgill Labov has addressed  himself to issues such as the relationship between language and social class, with his main objective no to learn more about a particular society or to examine consideration between linguistic and social phenomena, but to learn more about language and to investigate topics such as the mechanism of linguistic change, the nature of linguistic variability and the structure of linguistic systems. Trudgill view is that all work in this categories aimed ultimately at improving linguistic theory and at developing our understanding of the nature of language. For him this is genuine sociolinguistis.