Individual variation in Japanese foreigner talk

'Foreigner Talk' (FT) is a relatively new term in the socio-linguistic vocabulary. The term was first introduced by Ferguson in the late sixties to denote collectively the various adjustments, or 'corrections' which native speakers of a language make to their 'normal' speech to forestall, or remove, linguistic problems of communication with foreigners. Research in this area is still very much at the exploratory stage. But, on the basis of the data reported to date, Foreigner Talk can be broadly categorized into the 'talking down' and the 'talking-up' or 'language of classroom instruction' varieties which, however, are not mutually exclusive. lin this investigation features of Japanese Foreigner Talk, for a specific contact situation, on the levels of linguistic expression of politeness, grammatical complexity and selection/correction of vocabulary are described and their distribution and frequency of occurrence in the three sets of data are compared.