What is a lingua franca? A brief history, from the Crusades to today
- Written by: Alexandra Aikhenvald, Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow, Jawun Research Institute, CQUniversity Australia
When the Crusaders descended upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean at the end of the 11th century, they had to communicate with each other, with traders and with locals.
Many of them spoke different Romance languages: Italian (especially from the then powerful city-states of Venice and Genoa), Provençal, French or their forerunner, Latin.
Most Westerners in southern Europe were French, especially from between Marseilles and Genoa, from where ships and traders sailed towards the Middle East. These Westerners, as a whole, came to be called Franci (Franks, or French) by Arabs and Greeks.
Around the time of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) – and perhaps earlier – a mixed language gradually emerged in the eastern Mediterranean, and later spread to the west.
This common language used by the “Franks” and those who traded and fought with them was also known as Sabir, Bastard Italian and Bastard Spanish. But you might be most familiar with the term Lingua Franca: literally, Franks’ language.
The Frankish language was a mixture of simplified Italian, French and Spanish, with a smattering of Arabic and Turkish, and was in use across the Mediterranean shores in the Middle East until the late 19th century, before it faded away.
Written with lower case, lingua franca refers to any language used between people who have no other language in common.
An ancient tradition
Lingua francas go back to antiquity.
Sanskrit was a lingua franca throughout Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the first millennium CE, via trade and religion.
Around the Mediterranean, Greek was a lingua franca from about 300 BCE until about 500 CE, used in trade, literature and education, and in spreading early Christianity.
Between the second and the fourth centuries, standard Latin replaced Greek as the lingua franca of the expanding Catholic Church. Latin took over as the pan-European language of religion, culture and scholarship, and continued well into the 19th century.
From the 17th century, Arabic has been a lingua franca across the Islamic world, connecting communities across Africa and Asia.
That same century, with the rise of France as an economic power, French gradually replaced Latin in many areas as the first “global” lingua franca in politics, diplomacy, trade and education. French was the language of royal courts; scholars, aristocrats, merchants, and diplomats would use French to talk and to write to each other.
French continued to be the main language of international relations up until the end of the second world war.
After the 1940s, partly due to the growing influence of the United States, English has become the main lingua franca across the world.
Crafting a new language
With the colonial expansion of imperialistic powers and their languages Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch, since about 15th century, the name lingua franca came to be used as a common noun.
Throughout European colonisation, people from different language groups were forced to work together as slaves or indentured workers. They would communicate with each other, and with their masters, using a simplified language, for limited purposes – simple commands, questions and statements using a mixture of what each of them knew.
Such makeshift means of communication is known as pidgin language (from the English word business).
Pidgins can be used as lingua francas. Once speakers of a pidgin start marrying each other, a pidgin may become the sole language spoken by the next generation of children. It then expands into a fully-fledged language – a Creole – used for all purposes.
Creoles such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Sranan in Suriname, Kristang in Malaysia, and Haitian Creole in Haiti are lingua francas used across these countries.
A global language can also be of artificial origin.
The end of the 19th century saw an explosion of interest in constructing global languages. The most prominent of these was Esperanto, “the language of hope”, created by Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887 as “the international language”, or a general lingua franca. Esperanto still boasts a couple of thousand native speakers, and many more enthusiasts, but is gradually on the wane.
Today’s global lingua franca
Lingua francas arise when required, and fade when replaced by others.
German faded as a lingua franca with the loss of German colonies after the first world war. Portuguese remains a lingua franca across Brazil, and Spanish across other South American countries.
And the global use of French is still there: we send a letter par avion, or to poste restante.
But there is one winner, well ahead of the rest. English has now grown to be the global language, spreading well beyond native speakers and the former colonies of English-speaking powers. English is the language of world-wide diplomacy, scholarship, and especially technological advances, social media and artificial intelligence.
Does the aggressive spread of English threaten to put an end to all other languages, minority languages and other lingua franca alike, and language diversity across the world? The jury is still out.
The growing importance of Mandarin Chinese as a main lingua franca across China, of Arabic across Africa and the Middle East, and people’s resilience to keep their languages going – and with them their cultures and histories – may well keep English at bay.
Authors: Alexandra Aikhenvald, Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow, Jawun Research Institute, CQUniversity Australia
