For some years the convenience of incorporating sociolinguistic information into the teaching of a language has been reiterated. In the Anglo-Saxon context, «sociolinguistic grammar» is discussed occasionally, there have been some attempts to enrich grammatical information with variational data. However, in the case of Spanish, this information is seldom addressed, beyond the need to address differences in register when teaching Spanish to foreign students. We present a proposal to incorporate the sociolinguistic variable into the teaching of SSL, taking Bernstein's difference between a restricted code and an elaborated code, and relating all this to our own research on the different use of the lexicon according to the socio-cultural strata. We will focus on three lexical elements: adverbs in -mente, abstract nouns and classifying nouns, showing, unlike what is usually done in a SSL class, how spoken Spanish data show us that it would be advisable to didactically classify these elements, teaching several of them in higher levels of SSL. Key words: variable rule, Sociolinguistics, lexical variation, lexical frequencies.