What makes English formal or informal?
English has no du/Sie, so register lives in grammar and word choice. Four dials decide it: contraction or full form (I'd / I would), phrasal verb or Latinate verb (find out / establish), command or softener (Send it today / Could you send it today?) and ellipsis, which only makes language more relaxed (Got a sec? stays with the team). The situation and the relationship set the level — not rank.
- Register is a scale — formal, neutral, informal — not a choice between two forms.
- Phrasal verb for the team, Latinate verb for the board: look into / investigate, set up / arrange, get back to / respond.
- A bare imperative ("Send it today") reads as an instruction on every setting — requests need "could you" or a softener.
B1 · Business Grammar · 10 minFormal vs Informal Register, taught brick by brick.
A lesson for B1 learners who move between team chat, client calls and presentations at work. Hear the same request in two registers first, meet the four dials from your tutor, practise them in five interactive drills, then check what stuck in a six-question quiz. Everything runs in the browser, free to try, with no signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsGrammar, Speaking, Writing, Business English
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
What register actually is in English
In German you make one decision before you say a word: du or Sie. After that, almost everything else lines up on its own — the form of address, the verb ending, the tone. English has no such switch, which is why so many German-speaking learners search for it in vain. They cannot find it because English does not bundle politeness in one place; it spreads it across the whole grammar. Register in English is a scale with three zones: formal, neutral and informal. Where a sentence sits on that scale is decided by four dials, all of which you can operate at B1 level: contraction or full form, phrasal verb or Latinate verb, command or softener, full sentence or ellipsis. What matters is what sets the level. It is not the rank of the person you are talking to — your manager in a corridor chat gets relaxed English, while a peer from another company on a first call gets neutral to formal. The level follows the situation and the relationship: how well you know each other, how public the moment is, how big the thing you are asking for is. Once that has clicked, you stop memorising lists of "formal words" and start reading each situation and turning the right dials.
02 / 06
Dials one and two: contractions and verb choice
The first dial is the contraction. "I'd", "can't", "we've" and "it's" are normal in spoken English at every level — even when presenting to the board, native speakers usually say "we've reduced costs" rather than "we have reduced costs". The full form is a feature of formal writing: the report, the contract, the official notice. In speech you almost never need it — a speaker who avoids every contraction soon sounds like they are reading from a script; the full form is useful for deliberate emphasis, though. The second dial is verb choice, and it is the most powerful of the four. For many actions English keeps two verbs: a short phrasal verb and a longer verb of Latin or French origin. Find out and establish, set up and arrange, look into and investigate, get back to and respond, deal with and address — each pair means the same thing, but the phrasal verb belongs in conversation and the Latinate verb in the report. Two warnings go with this. Neutral business English uses phrasal verbs freely: "I'll set up a call" is perfectly professional on a client call. And a chat message full of Latinate verbs does not sound competent, it sounds odd — a "We will investigate" between two emojis mixes two registers in one line. Choose the verb by the situation, not by its length.
03 / 06
Dial three: directness and softening
The third dial controls how directly you put a request. At the bottom sits the bare imperative: "Send it today." In English that is not a request but an instruction — on every setting of the scale. It fits emergencies, safety notices and user manuals, not the people you work with. One step up is the question with a modal: "Could you send it today?" That is the neutral request, and it does most of the work in client calls, meetings and the majority of emails. At the top sits the extended softener: "I would be grateful if you could send it by the end of the day." That belongs in formal writing and in situations where the other person could easily say no. The impersonal passive belongs to the same dial. A formal report writes "The figures were sent late" rather than "Tom sent the figures late": the problem is named without anyone pointing at a person. In the team chat the same passive would sound strangely evasive. Proportion matters: one softener per request. "Could you possibly perhaps maybe…" does not sound more polite, it sounds unsure. A clear request on the right setting is the most polite form English has.
04 / 06
Dial four: ellipsis and fillers
The fourth dial is the only one that works in one direction only: it makes language more relaxed, never more formal. Ellipsis means leaving out words that the context supplies anyway. "Got a sec?" instead of "Have you got a second?", "Sounds good" instead of "That sounds good", "No worries" as a complete answer. Add to that the small fillers and reactions that keep a conversation between people who trust each other moving: "Sure", "Cool", "Fair enough", "Will do". All of this is typical of spoken informal register and of the team chat, which is essentially written speech — though short reactions like "Sure" and "Sounds good" turn up in neutral conversations too. For German-speaking learners this dial is especially valuable because it is the antidote to over-formalising. If you write "I would like to inform you that the report is finished" in a chat, you have not chosen a wrong form but a wrong setting. "Report's done — have a look when you've got a sec" is the same message on the right setting. A note on the limit: on a client call you are having for the second time, "Sure" and "Sounds good" as reactions are perfectly fine. Whole requests in ellipsis — "Figures by Thursday?" — stay reserved for the team. In a presentation or a report, ellipsis has no place at all.
05 / 06
Three traps for German speakers
The first trap is the search for the one switch. Because German has a yes/no decision in du and Sie, many learners treat English the same way: work means Sie, Sie means formal, so they turn everything up everywhere. The result is chat messages like "I would like to inform you" and meeting contributions like "I hereby propose". Nothing about them is grammatically wrong — but the setting does not match the situation, and native speakers read it as stiff or even ironic. The second trap is German directness. "Schicken Sie mir das bitte heute" is, with its Sie and its bitte, a perfectly polite request in German. The literal transfer "Send me that today, please" remains a command with a please attached — in English the imperative reads as an instruction in every register. The same trap includes "I want that you…", which copies the German dass-structure: it is ungrammatical ("I want you to…" would be correct) and sounds demanding on top of that. The third trap is the equation "formal = big words". A learner who believes Latinate verbs improve every sentence sprinkles them into relaxed talk as well: "Let me investigate that real quick" mixes boardroom and coffee kitchen in one breath. Mixed signals inside one utterance confuse the listener more than a consistently relaxed or consistently formal version would.
06 / 06
At work: presentation, client call, team chat
Three situations cover most of your working day, and each has its own default setting. The board presentation or the written status report sit at the formal end: Latinate verbs ("We have arranged a review", "The delay was caused by…"), the passive for problems, softeners for requests. When speaking, contractions stay normal even here — formal does not mean stiff. The client call sits in the middle, and that is where most real business communication happens: full sentences, "Could you…" for requests, phrasal verbs without hesitation ("I'll get back to you tomorrow"), short reactions like "Sure" allowed. The team chat and conversation with colleagues you know well sit at the informal end: ellipsis, fillers, "can" instead of "could", phrasal verbs everywhere. Two habits make the choice easy. First, set the level before you start, then keep every sentence on that level — a switch in the middle of an utterance is the real problem, not a "too relaxed" or "too formal" version. Second, mirror the other side. If the client says "Sounds good, let's set it up" after two calls, you may step down one level. If she stays with "Could you arrange…", so do you. How to put the same dials to work across complete emails is the next step: formal-informal-email-register (B1).