This study proposes four different operationalisations of the basic hypothesis of Brown and Levinson's politeness theory. It then reports on a questionnaire study carried out with adolescents in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Køge (Denmark), two urban multicultural areas, involving adolescents with a Turkish migrant background and without a migration background. All four groups of adolescents attenuate the linguistic encoding of social hierarchies, if they even acknowledge them; this calls into question the universality of the determinative relationship between language and social context.