A language people use to talk to each other when neither speaks the other's first language. Literally 'the Frankish tongue' — and the original one was a real, specific language.
What it really means
Today a lingua franca is any language two strangers fall back on. English between a Norwegian and a Japanese engineer; Swahili across much of East Africa; Latin, once, across educated Europe.
That is the general sense, and it is a borrowing from a specific one.
The original lingua franca was a real language with a real territory. From the 1620s the phrase names a stripped-down Italian, mixed with Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic and Turkish, spoken around the ports of the eastern Mediterranean. It was nobody's mother tongue. It existed to get business done between people who had no other language in common, and it was assembled out of whatever was to hand.
The name is the interesting part. Lingua franca is Italian for the Frankish tongue — and the Franks here are not the French. From the Crusades onward, Arabic usage called every western European a Frank, whatever country he came from. So the language of the foreigners became, to the people they traded with, the Frank language. Seventeenth-century English sources sometimes called the same thing Bastard Spanish.
There is something fitting in how the phrase travelled. A word for a makeshift language, assembled from several others for convenience, was itself assembled out of an Italian noun and an Arabic habit of speech — and then borrowed into English to mean something broader than it started out meaning.
Where it comes from
The name comes from the Crusades-era Arabic habit of calling every European a Frank.
Myths & misconceptions
Lingua franca just means 'common language'.
That is what it means now. It began as the name of one specific language: a stripped-down Italian peppered with Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic and Turkish, used around the eastern Mediterranean. The general sense came later, from the name of that particular pidgin.
It is French.
The phrase is Italian, and the Franks in it are not the French. Arabic usage from the Crusades onward called all western Europeans Franks, and the name stuck to the trade language they spoke.
How it connects
- Pidginwhat the original lingua franca actually was — a contact language, built for business.
Questions people ask
- What does lingua franca mean?
- A shared language used between people who do not speak each other's first language. It is Italian for 'Frankish tongue', recorded in English from the 1620s.
- Is English a lingua franca?
- In the modern sense of the phrase, yes: it is the language two people who share no other often reach for. In the original sense it is not, because the original lingua franca was one particular Mediterranean contact language.