RP

Trudgill (1983)

In 1974, he investigated the use of the -ng at the end of words, and found that the lower class you were, the less likely you were to use the -ng, preferring -n', and concluded that it wasn't unique to Norwich, and extended to the whole English speaking world.

Found:

1. In all social classes, the more careful the speech, the more likely people were to say walking rather than walkin'.
2. The proportion of walkin' type forms was higher in lower social classes.
3. The nonstandard -in' forms occurred much more often in men's speech than in women's, and this was true for all social classes.
4. When women were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the standard -ing forms more often than they really did.
5. When men were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the nonstandard -in' forms more often than they really did.

He found that the use of -ing in Norwich were as follows:

	Male	Female
middle middle class	96	100
lower middle class	73	97
upper working class	19	32
middle working class	9	19
lower working class	0	3

as So men used informal language more often than women in every scenario. And in addition, women thought they were using the -ing more than they really did, and men thought they used -ng more tan they really did.