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The strong tendency to neutralize the opposition between tu and ustedin Spanish is often put down to factors which are both linguistic (ambiguous verb forms, verb meaning, emphasis, etc.) and extralinguistic (age, sex, social and cultural standing). The article approaches this tendency from a sociolinguistic angle and in terms of social levels, by studying the utterances of speakers from a working-class area of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). The study applies a reticular model to a body of interviews, first analyzing the relationship between types of variants and various linguistic factors, then applying the software package SPSS to look for a correlation between the range of variants and the social, extralinguistic information obtained in a written questionnaire. The conclusions are compared with the results of research on other characteristics of Spanish