ABSTRACT
Although social class1 is regarded as one of the major – if not the major – external constraints in much of the sociolinguistic literature, it is not an issue that has attracted much attention recently. Unlike the recent research on gender, most of what we know about the role of social status in language change was investigated a couple of decades ago. However, although not a fashionable area of study today, linguistic differences between social classes are generally taken for granted in sociolinguistic research. With time it has also become evident that the stratification patterns discovered by Labov, Trudgill, Wolfram and others in western cities are not universal. Sociolinguistic differ ences vary according to the type of society and culture people live in.
