A lingua franca (; ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language, or language of wider communication (LWC), is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages.Viacheslav A. Chirikba, "The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund" in Pieter Muysken, ed., From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics, 2008, p. 31.
Lingua francas have developed around the world throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages" facilitated trade), but also for cultural, religious, diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities. The term is taken from the medieval Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a Romance-based pidgin language used especially by traders in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. A world language—a language spoken internationally and by many people—is a language that may function as a global lingua franca.
Characteristics
Any language regularly used for communication between people who do not share a native language is a lingua franca."vehicular, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, July 2018. Web. 1 November 2018. Lingua franca is a functional term, independent of any linguistic history or language structure.Intro Sociolinguistics – Pidgin and Creole Languages: Origins and Relationships – Notes for LG102, – University of Essex, Peter L. Patrick – Week 11, Autumn term.
Pidgins are therefore lingua francas; creoles and arguably mixed languages may similarly be used for communication between language groups. However, the term lingua franca is equally applicable to a non-creole language native to one nation, often a colonial power, learned as a second language and used for communication between diverse language communities in a colony or former colony.
Lingua francas are often pre-existing languages with native speakers, but they can also be pidgins or creoles developed for that specific region or context. Pidgins are rapidly developed and simplified combinations of two or more established languages, while creoles are generally viewed as pidgins that have evolved into fully complex languages in the course of adaptation by subsequent generations. Often, pre-existing lingua francas such as French are used to facilitate intercommunication in large-scale trade or political matters, while pidgins and creoles often arise out of colonial situations and a specific need for communication between colonists and indigenous peoples. Pre-existing lingua francas are generally widespread, highly developed languages with many native speakers. Conversely, pidgins are very simplified means of communication, containing loose structuring, few grammatical rules, and possessing few or no native speakers. Creole languages are more developed than their ancestral pidgins, utilizing more complex structure, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as having substantial communities of native speakers.
Whereas a vernacular language is the native language of a specific geographical community, a lingua franca is used beyond the boundaries of its original community, for trade, religious, political, or academic reasons. For example, English is a in the United Kingdom but it is used as a in the Philippines, alongside Filipino. Likewise, Arabic, French, Standard Chinese, Russian and Spanish serve similar purposes as industrial and educational lingua francas across regional and national boundaries.
Even though they are used as bridge languages, international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto have not had a great degree of adoption, so they are not described as lingua francas.
Etymology The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era. During that period, a simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern Mediterranean and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loanwords from Greek, Slavic languages, Arabic, and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian.
In Lingua Franca (the specific language), is from the Italian for 'a language'. is related to Greek () and Arabic () as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is 'Frankish', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks'. During the late Byzantine Empire, Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.
Through changes of the term in literature, lingua franca has come to be interpreted as a general term for pidgins, creoles, and some or all forms of vehicular languages. This transition in meaning has been attributed to the idea that pidgin languages only became widely known from the 16th century on due to European colonization of continents such as The Americas, Africa, and Asia. During this time, the need for a term to address these pidgin languages arose, hence the shift in the meaning of Lingua Franca from a single proper noun to a common noun encompassing a large class of pidgin languages.
As recently as the late 20th century, some restricted the use of the generic term to mean only mixed languages that are used as vehicular languages, its original meaning.Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, Simon and Schuster, 1980
Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term Lingua Franca (as the name of the particular language) was first recorded in English during the 1670s, although an even earlier example of the use of it in English is attested from 1632, where it is also referred to as "Bastard Spanish".
Examples
Historical lingua francas
The use of lingua francas has existed since antiquity.
Akkadian remained the common language of a large part of Western Asia from several earlier empires, until it was supplanted in this role by Aramaic.Ostler, 2005 pp. 38–40Ostler, 2010 pp. 163–167
Sanskrit historically served as a lingua franca throughout the majority of South Asia.The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. Nicholas Ostler. Ch.7. A Dictionary of Buddhism p.350 Before the European Challenge: The Great Civilizations of Asia and the Middle East p.180 The Sanskrit language's historic presence is attested across a wide geography beyond South Asia. Inscriptions and literary evidence suggest that Sanskrit was already being adopted in Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the 1st millennium CE, through monks, religious pilgrims and merchants.
Until the early 20th century, Literary Chinese served as both the written lingua franca and the diplomatic language in East Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Ryūkyū, Vietnam and Taiwan. In the early 20th century, vernacular written Chinese replaced Classical Chinese within China as both the written and spoken lingua franca for speakers of different Chinese dialects, and because of the declining power and cultural influence of China in East Asia, English has since replaced Classical Chinese as the lingua franca in East Asia.
Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Hellenistic culture. Koine Greek (Modern ; ), also known as Hellenistic Greek or Biblical Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries.
Latin, through the power of the Roman Republic, became the dominant language in Italy and subsequently throughout the realms of the Roman Empire. Even after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Latin was the common language of communication, science, and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition.
Old Tamil was once the lingua franca for most of ancient Tamilakam and Sri Lanka. John Guy states that Tamil was also the lingua franca for early maritime traders from India. The language and its dialects were used widely in the state of Kerala as the major language of administration, literature and common usage until the 12th century CE.
Classical Māori is the retrospective name for the language (formed out of many dialects, albeit all mutually intelligible) of both the North Island and the South Island for the 800 years before the European settlement of New Zealand.Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, Te Taumata Tuarua - Wai 262 (2011), Waitangi Tribunal, pp. 41Preservation of Classical Maori', from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A.H. McLintock. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/1966/maori-language/page-10 (accessed 16 Mar 2024)High or Classical Māori: Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 21. 5 September 1973 Māori shared a common language that was used for trade, inter-iwi dialogue on marae, and education through wānanga. After the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori language was the lingua franca of the Colony of New Zealand until English superseded it in the 1870s. The description of Māori language as New Zealand's 19th-century lingua franca has been widely accepted.Benton, Richard A. "Changes in Language Use in a Rural Maori Community 1963-1978." The Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 89, no. 4, 1980, pp. 455–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20705517. Accessed 15 Mar. 2024. The language was initially vital for all European and Chinese migrants in New Zealand to learn, as Māori formed a majority of the population, owned nearly all the country's land and dominated the economy until the 1860s. Discriminatory laws such as the Native Schools Act 1867 contributed to the demise of Māori language as a lingua franca. In earlier contact eras, Māori was also among the bases for Maritime Polynesian Pidgin for use between European voyagers and trading Polynesians as a whole.
Sogdian was used to facilitate trade between those who spoke different languages along the Silk Road, which is why native speakers of Sogdian were employed as translators in Tang China. The Sogdians also ended up circulating spiritual beliefs and texts, including those of Buddhism and Christianity, thanks to their ability to communicate to many people in the region through their native language.