Many speech communities have one or more FT registers, and the small amount of research done has usually focussed on the kind of FT used in talking down’ to speakers of other languages who are felt to be socially inferior in some important respects (e.g., less civilized, of inferior religion, low social status).
- Ferguson-DeBose (1977), a pag.103-104

FT features that are probably widespread […] include the following: slow, exaggerated enunciation; greater overall loudness; use of full forms instead of contractions; short sentences; parataxis (pure or with adverbial connectives such as 'maybe', 'bye-and-bye'); repetition of words; analytical paraphrases of lexical items and certain constructions; reduction of inflections (often by the selection of one or two all-purpose forms e.g., 'me' for 'I', 'mine', 'me' in English, infinitive for all non-past verb forms in Italian, 'die' for all forms of the definite article in German); lack of function words (e.g., articles, prepositions, auxiliaries); use of feedback devices such as invariable tag questions, avoidance of strongly dialect or slang forms in favour of more standard forms; limited number of phonological simplifications (e.g., occasional addition of vowels to final consonants in English, 'b' for 'p' in Italian); speech lexicon of quantifiers, intensifiers, and modal particles used in constructions not matching ‘normal’ language; use of foreign or foreign-sounding words (e.g., English 'savvy').
- Ferguson-DeBose (1977), a pag.104