All societies, regardless time and context, have specialised the use of their verbal repertoire according to certain communicative situations, characterised by showing degrees of formality. Hence, a particular domain such as verbal politeness, is established and given a careful attention by educational institutions, in charge of transmitting it. Such transmission is socially selective, so a marked use of verbal politeness, as a sociolinguistically discriminating index, is made as possible. As a result, verbal politeness patterns not only depend upon the ideology of each society at a given historical moment, but they are also a way of contributing to the shaping and development of the prevailing ideological hegemony. We present here the case of Spain from 1875 to 1975 and we follow for its analysis the directions given by the social history of language.