lingua franca

From roughly the 11th through the 19th centuries, a simplified contact language circulated along the Mediterranean basin wherever Arab, Berber, Ottoman, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, and Catalan merchants, sailors, soldiers, and captives needed to communicate. Linguists call it the Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir. Arabic speakers called it lisān al-Faranī — 'the Frankish tongue' — because the Arabic word Faranī (Frank) had come to designate all Western Europeans, from the Carolingian Franks who had impressed themselves on the Islamic world during the Crusades and earlier. From Arabic, the term passed into Italian as lingua franca — 'Frankish language' — and described this hybrid tongue.

The Lingua Franca's linguistic structure was built primarily on Italian and Provençal vocabulary, with Portuguese, Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish contributions. What made it a pidgin rather than a dialect of any of these languages was its grammar: radically simplified, stripped of most inflection, using invariant verb forms and context to carry meaning that the parent languages expressed through conjugation and declension. Sailors from Genoa and merchants from Tunis could negotiate a cargo price; Moorish captives in Algiers could communicate with Spanish ransomers; Ottoman janissaries and Venetian traders could argue over exchange rates. The language was nobody's pride and everybody's tool.

Molière satirized the Lingua Franca in 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (1670), giving the character of a Turkish dignitary a speech in comically garbled Lingua Franca to mock aristocratic pretension. The passage is one of the earliest extended transcriptions of the language in literary French, and it has been invaluable to linguists reconstructing the Lingua Franca's grammar — even though Molière was making fun of it. The language appears in travelers' accounts, diplomatic documents, and navigational manuals from the 1300s through the 1800s, then gradually disappears as European colonial expansion imposed national languages on the Mediterranean trade.

In the 19th century, 'lingua franca' detached from the specific historical pidgin and became a general term for any language used as a common medium between speakers of different native tongues. Today the phrase is used in academic linguistics, international diplomacy, and ordinary speech to describe the role English currently plays globally, or the role Latin played in medieval European scholarship, or the role Swahili plays across East Africa. The phrase has completed the journey every successful pidgin aspires to: from a specific makeshift to a universal concept. The Frankish tongue became the term for all common tongues.