Summary

The graduate qualification work is devoted to the investigation of the social differentiation of the English language in Great Britain. The author of the work considers the main social classes of England today; reveals the essence of such concepts as «dialect», «territorial dialect», «sociolect», «Received Pronunciation», «Standard English»; defines English class dialects according to their linguistic content. The analysis of their linguistic features on the phonetic and lexical levels reveals a number of common and distinct features between different class dialects. This work may be useful for specialists in the field of linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology and phonetics.