The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca

Book excerpt: This book explores many of the unanswered questions surrounding the original and eponymous Lingua Franca, a language spoken by peoples across the Mediterranean and North Africa for nearly three centuries. Allowing people from different countries, classes and cultures to interact with one another for the purposes of trade, piracy, slavery and diplomacy - among many other domains - Lingua Franca was lexified by Romance languages, including Italian and its dialects, Spanish, French and Portuguese, with possible Turkish and Arabic influences as well. The potential unreliability of source accounts, the blurring of fact and fiction across documentary and dramatic sources, and the linguistic biases and plurilingual repertoire of many of Lingua Franca’s speakers all combine to make Lingua Franca an elusive topic for examination. The author draws upon previously unexplored documentary evidence, including correspondence from the era found in The National Archives at Kew, to shed light on the multilingual and plurilingual landscape that fostered Lingua Franca’s development and spread, and its influence on the written domain. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial history, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and language contact.