Lingua Franca 2019

[Clara Zellinger]

Anylanguage regularly used for communication between people who do not share a native language is a lingua franca.[6] Lingua franca is a functional term, independent of any linguistic history or language structure.[7]

Pidgins are therefore lingua francas; creoles and arguably mixed languages may similarly be used for communication between language groups. But 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.[8]

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.[9] 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.[10] Pre-existing lingua francas are generally widespread, highly developed languages with many native speakers.[citation needed] 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.[11]

Whereas a vernacular language is the native language of a specific geographical community,[12] a lingua franca is used beyond the boundaries of its original community, for trade, religious, political, or academic reasons.[13] For example, English is a vernacular in the United Kingdom but it is used as a lingua franca 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.

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.[15][8] 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.[13]

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.[20]

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,[22] 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".[23]

Sanskrit historically served as a lingua franca throughout the majority of South Asia.[29][30][31] 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.[32][33][34]

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, and Vietnam.[35] 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.

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.[40] 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 AD. Tamil was also used widely in inscriptions found in the southern Andhra Pradesh districts of Chittoor and Nellore until the 12th century AD.[41] Tamil was used for inscriptions from the 10th through 14th centuries in southern Karnataka districts such as Kolar, Mysore, Mandya and Bangalore.[42]

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.

Classical Māori is the retrospective name for the language (formed out of many dialects, albeit all mutually intelligible)[43] of both the North Island and the South Island for the 800 years before the European settlement of New Zealand.[44][45][46][47][48] Māori shared a common language that was used for trade, inter-iwi dialogue on marae, and education through wānanga.[49][50] 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.[43][51] The description of Māori language as New Zealand's 19th-century lingua franca has been widely accepted.[52][53][54][55] The language was initially vital for all European and Chinese migrants in New Zealand to learn,[56][57][58] as Māori formed a majority of the population, owned nearly all the country's land and dominated the economy until the 1860s.[56][59] Discriminatory laws such as the Native Schools Act 1867 contributed to the demise of Māori language as a lingua franca.[43]

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.[60] 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.[61]

Old Church Slavonic, an Eastern South Slavic language, is the first Slavic literary language. Between 9th and 11th century, it was the lingua franca of a great part of the predominantly Slavic states and populations in Southeast and Eastern Europe, in liturgy and church organization, culture, literature, education and diplomacy, as an Official language and National language in the case of Bulgaria. It was the first national and also international Slavic literary language (autonym словѣ́ньскъ ѩꙁꙑ́къ, slověnĭskŭ językŭ).[62][63] The Glagolitic alphabet was originally used at both schools, though the Cyrillic script was developed early on at the Preslav Literary School, where it superseded Glagolitic as the official script in Bulgaria in 893. Old Church Slavonic spread to other South-Eastern, Central, and Eastern European Slavic territories, most notably Croatia, Serbia, Bohemia, Lesser Poland, and principalities of the Kievan Rus' while retaining characteristically South Slavic linguistic features. It spread also to not completely Slavic territories between the Carpathian Mountains, the Danube and the Black sea, corresponding to Wallachia and Moldavia. Nowadays, the Cyrillic writing system is used for various languages across Eurasia, and as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central, North, and East Asia.

The Mediterranean Lingua Franca was largely based on Italian and Provenal. This language was spoken from the 11th to 19th centuries around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in the European commercial empires of Italian cities (Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Siena) and in trading ports located throughout the eastern Mediterranean rim.[64]

During the Renaissance, standard Italian was spoken as a language of culture in the main royal courts of Europe, and among intellectuals. This lasted from the 14th century to the end of the 16th, when French replaced Italian as the usual lingua franca in northern Europe.[citation needed] Italian musical terms, in particular dynamic and tempo notations, have continued in use to the present day.[65][66]

Classical Quechua is either of two historical forms of Quechua, the exact relationship and degree of closeness between which is controversial, and which have sometimes been identified with each other.[67] These are:

Afrikaans originated as a contact language formed in the 17th century. The formation of the Afrikaans language started in 1652, with the colonization of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch-speaking settler Jan van Riebeek. When Jan van Riebeek and other European settlers arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, approximately fifty thousand indigenous people were residing in the area. Among the natives were Bantu tribes, the Khoi, who were pastoral farmers, and the San tribes, who were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.

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