So, I’m going to start this answer with a little bit about what a sociolect is, and how we can identify them historically. Then, I’ll talk about what they look like (to the best of our knowledge) in Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English.

A sociolect is a variation in language based on social class or stratification, and is viewed as distinct from a regional dialect, though of course there is significant overlap between the two, and sociolects and regional dialects can compound upon each other--the linguistic differences between the urban elite in London and a farmer in the countryside cannot fully be explained by either geographical or class differences.

The thing is, sociolects have been around for as long as there have been significant class differences. The issue we have is figuring out what they were: in order to really identify a historical sociolect, of the kind OP’s asking about in their question, we need a corpus of a statistically significant size which represents people from all across the gender and class spectrums. The immediate problem we then run into is that of literacy: until fairly recently, well after the emergence of sociolects, the only linguistic evidence we really have is that which was written down. Simply put, since sociolects are associated with class, they are thus associated strongly with education levels and, in turn, with literacy rates, meaning that for the relevant time periods we have much, much more writings from the nobility or elites than from the working class. Naturally, this makes it difficult to trace differences between sociolects very far back.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a setup for a miraculous solution, it’s a setup to say that much of these nuances are beyond our reach.

But let’s dive into what we do know, starting with Old English. The surviving corpus for Old English is sizable, at around 3.5 million words, but nearly all filtered through monasteries, meaning that is not representative of diverse class backgrounds. Another difficulty in tracing sociolects of Old English is that England in this time period was either diglossic (English and Latin) or multiglossic (English, Latin, and possibly Celtic languages or Old Scandinavian), depending on the time period--a diglossia is when two fully distinct languages have different purposes in a community; a multiglossia three or more. So, while there certainly would have been differences in the way people spoke English dictated by region and class, we struggle to pinpoint exactly what these differences might be. Further, the diglossia or multiglossia makes the different languages take up some of the characteristics that in a monolingual society we would associate with sociolects--i.e., Latin was a more prestigious language than English, so variations within English may have been less meaningful.

In the 11th century, after the Norman Conquest (1066), English was at the bottom of a triglossic system with Latin and Anglo-Norman French. Anglo-Norman was spoken by both the Norman elite and ambitious native English speakers, so to learn or be able to speak Anglo-Norman was in many ways sending a message to anyone you talked to about who you were or who you aspired to be. This comes into play later as well, but the general idea behind this is simple: people who are seeking upward mobility have, in the recent past and present, demonstrated themselves to be remarkably attuned to linguistic differences between the class they are seeking and the one they came from. Sometimes this results in a bit of a stilted way of talking, as it can be perceived as overly formal.

In Middle English, we begin to see the emergence of the written record of what would recognizably be sociolects (italics purely to emphasize that Middle English probably did not have the first English sociolects, but rather the first ones we can begin to pinpoint). For example, the scholar Timothy Machan describes the use of court language in the poem Gawain and the Green Knight as a sociolect, as it is only accessible to the nobility. Anne Scott argues similarly for the work Havelok the Dane, with a distinction between what she terms “kingly” and “rougish” discourse, meaning that to the author of Havelok, and to their audience as well, there were certain tendencies of speech associated with class or status.

In Early Modern English, spoken from around 1500, we have a large enough corpus that we can begin to accurately group sociolects together. The current model is a four-tiered one. The first tier consists of the elite: royals, nobles, clergy. The second tier consists of the upwardly mobile, as talked about above. The third tier is merchants and professionals, and the fourth tier is sort of a catch-all for everyone else. It’s likely that the fourth tier was, in actuality, more stratified than it appears to be based on its grouping into one “tier”, but the relatively low literacy rates of that portion of the population make further attempts shaky at best. Further, these tiers are unfortunately only descriptive of male linguistic variation.

I want to add here that, while we can pinpoint sociolects within male writings more accurately, there are significant traceable differences across the board between male and female writings, which some would classify as sociolects. For example, in the 16th century, women adopted the newfangled subject pronoun you (in contrast with the already-established ye) at a much faster rate than men; from 1540-1559 women used you ~85% of the time, in contrast with men’s <50% usage rate; from 1560 to 1580, women and men both used you over 95% of the time). These changes are not always female-led; men in the later 16th century were leaders in the decline of the use of double negations.These class differences were certainly noticed at the time. Richard Puttenham, writing in 1589, wrote that

neither shall he follow the speach of a craftes man or carter, or other of the inferiour sort, though he be inhabitant or bred in the best towne and Citie in this Realme, for such persons doe abuse good speaches by strange accents or ill shapen soundes, and false ortographie. But he shall follow generally the better brought up sort, such as the Greekes call [charientes] men ciuill and graciously behauoured and bred.

Puttenham is writing a sort of advice manual, which is why the subject of this sentence is “he”. Anyway, it’s clear from this passage that Puttenham noticed a difference in the way “the better brought up sort” and “the inferiour sort,” who he specifically identified with tradesmen and manual laborers, spoke and wrote English, and also obvious that he is making the judgement that one way is better than the other. (It’s also evident that Puttenham favors accents from certain areas, specifically the South of England, over others, but that’s sort of tangential to the question, and something to write a whole different answer on). As such, we can be very confident that sociolects had emerged by this time, and that they had been observed by contemporaries.

Finally, it would be remiss not to point out that sociolects usually come from class differences, and not the other way around. Obviously the “upwardly mobile” social class that I talked about earlier are consciously changing the way they talk to seem upper class, but in general the differences between the ways different social classes talked was not what determined the class they were, but a byproduct of it. In other words, accents and sociolects generally do not determine class or societal standing, they reflect class or societal standing.

Sources:

Primary:

The arte of English poesie Contriued into three bookes: the first of poets and poesie, the second of proportion, the third of ornament.Puttenham, George, d. 1590., Puttenham, Richard, 1520?-1601?,, Lumley, John Lumley, 1534?-1609, retrieved from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A68619.0001.001/1:6?rgn=div1;view=toc;q1=brought (quote is from page 121 in the third book).

Secondary:

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Scott, Anne. "Language as Convention, Language as Sociolect in "Havelok the Dane". Studies in Philology 89, no. 2 (1992): 137-60. Accessed July 31, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174416.

Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. “Sociolinguistics and the History of English: A Survey”. International Journal of English Studies, vol.5, (2005)” 33-58.

Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton, ed. The History of English: Early Modern English. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017.