A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty-one
Commend me to honest lingua franca. Why, this is enough to stun a Christian, with
your Hebrew, and your Greek, and such like Latin. (Dryden, Limberham; or, The Kind
Keeper, 356)The lingua franca—a language of convenience used by speakers of mutually-
incomprehensible mother tongues, mainly Arabic, Turkish, Greek and the Romance
vernaculars, in the pre-modern Mediterranean—makes a peculiarly chimeric object of
scholarly analysis. Because it never became a written language, it left no paper trail
beyond snatches of dialogue recorded by travelers through the Mediterranean. And
almost without exception, those brief and equivocal “texts” are colored by the condi-
tions in which they were recorded: most typically, narratives of captivity, brigandage
or some less salacious but still fraught adventure at sea. Furthermore, any exchange
overheard and recorded by a traveler will inevitably have been made to conform to the
writer’s own grammatical, lexical and orthographic habits—which, in an era that pre-
dated standardized grammar and orthography, may themselves be fluid and unpre-
dictable. Finally, men caught in the sorts of exchanges where the lingua franca would
be used—conversations between corsairs and captives, for instance—do not make the
most dispassionate and objective witnesses. Writing a thorough and accurate account
of the language might seem (with only a slight stretch of the imagination) like using
musical notation to score the sound of the waves.
In this essay, I will survey what is known and what seems unknowable about the
language, from its first appearances in the historical record to its afterlife as a memory
of a provisional form of communication across linguistic boundaries. Despite the spo-
radic nature of the historical record, it seems obvious that some form of linguistic
accommodation must be made to facilitate trade in the pre-modern Mediterranean.
The lingua franca responds in a general way to this exigency, and more specifically to
the historical conditions of trade and travel in the Mediterranean between roughly
1000 and 1800 ce. In brief, the lingua franca is a necessary condition for Mediterranean
commerce, and Mediterranean connectivity in general, but the Mediterranean is not
Lingua Franca
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