  Since Labov's (1964) foundational work on the social stratification of
language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the
relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and
perception. Despite the large body of evidence identifying significant
relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production,
relatively few of these factors have been investigated in the context of NLP
technology. While age and gender are well covered, Labov's initial target,
socio-economic class, is largely absent. We survey the existing Natural
Language Processing (NLP) literature and find that only 20 papers even mention
socio-economic status. However, the majority of those papers do not engage with
class beyond collecting information of annotator-demographics. Given this
research lacuna, we provide a definition of class that can be operationalised
by NLP researchers, and argue for including socio-economic class in future
language technologies.
