The aim of this study is to analyze the use of explanation reformulators in a sample of the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile, from a sociolinguistic point of view. Specifically, the behavior of discourse markers that meet this function are described and at the same time the sociolinguistic distribution of this use is established in a stratified sample of 120 interviews. Besides, the concept and the classification of discourse markers by Martin Zorraquino and Portoles (1999) and Portoles (2001), and the suggestions offered by Cortes (1998) and Carbonero and Santana (2010) for the quantitative study of the social variation of markers is applied. In the analysis, sex, age and socioeconomic group of the subjects interviewed were correlated with the use of explanation reformulators based on their functional commutability at the discursive level. The results show that o sea is the most common explanatory marker and that it is followed by onda and digamos. Finally, the three markers above are employed by individuals of upper middle group, while onda and digamos are most used by young and elderly subjects, respectively.