lingua franca 331
a necessary condition for it. The historical specifics of the language—the form that it
took, as well as its name—are peculiar to the Mediterranean. But the creation of a
mixed contact language and its use to support the movement of people and merchan-
dise is not.
Writing in an elite environment (and in a learned form of the language which, in a
more popular register, generated the lingua franca), Baldassare Castiglione wrote:
“commerce between diverse nations has always had the effect of transporting new
words from one to the other, almost as merchandise is transported” (Castiglione,
1991: 7)—a succinct and elegant summary of the dynamic of circulation that gener-
ated the lingua franca. Words move like merchandise from one nation to another,
and the language itself serves a more exalted function: so essential to all forms of com-
merce and human mobility that we might see it as a form of currency itself, both an
exigency—a necessary precondition for Mediterranean connectivity—and contingent,
in its formal linguistic characteristics.
NomenclatureThe name most frequently used for the language in the historical sources—lingua
franca – effectively captures the dynamics of Mediterranean circulation in the linguis-
tic context. The term is typically recognized as either Italian (generating a standard
Italian plural, lingue franche) or as a Latin phrase naturalized in English language
scholarship (producing the plural lingua francas). The noun lingua is unproblematic.
In both Italian and Latin it means tongue, in either the anatomical or abstract sense,
and here signifies “language.” The formation of the adjective franca, however, is
more complex: it is a Romance borrowing of an Arabic borrowing of a Greek borrow-
ing of a Latin word. The word emerged from the murky depths onto the stage of
history as the ethnonym which the Romans used for the Germanic tribes beyond the
Alps, presumably derived from the Franks’ own name for themselves. After the coro-
nation of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as emperor of the western empire,
Byzantines used the term phrangoi—a Greek appropriation of the Latin Franci—to
refer to western Christians in general. The Arabs acquired the term from the
Byzantines, and used it in an Arabized form (ifranjı̄) to refer to western Christians.
And western Christians themselves learned the word when they started to travel in the
Levant in large numbers, during the era of the Crusades (Kahane, 1976; Cifoletti,
1989: 5–6). Frank (in whatever linguistic coloration it occurred) consistently meant
western Christians, sometimes Romance-speaking western Christians in particular, as
viewed by either Byzantine Christians or Arabs. Finally, during the sixteenth century,
the adjective was attached to the noun lingua. The term lingua franca—the language
of the Franks, the western Christians—referred to a language of convenience used
throughout the Mediterranean, essentially a simplified form of Italian with an infusion
of vocabulary from other languages, especially Arabic and Spanish.
However, a dazzling number of other terms might be used to refer to the language
in the sources—an early indication of the vaguely-defined nature of the language itself:
franco or piccolo franco; “bad Italian” (italien corroumpu or italien baragouïné in the
French sources, italiano corrotto in Italian);^1 Antoine Galland (1646–1715), best
known as translator of the 1001 Nights, would refer to it as “un certain langage par mi
et ti” (“a certain language using ‘mi’ and ‘ti’”; Dakhlia, 2008: 267); French-language