332 karla mallette
sources from colonial Algeria call it sabir. At times, in medieval Italian narratives, it
seems possible that references to Italian and even to Latin might indicate the presence
of the lingua franca. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, “latino” is spoken both by a Sicilian
maiden washed up on the shores of Tunisia (V.2) and by Saladin and his men when
they travel through the European countryside (IX.9). If it seems extremely unlikely
that the great Arab sultan would speak common lingua franca, the notion that a
Sicilian girl would speak Latin is equally far-fetched. In Chaucer’s Man of Law’s tale—
borrowed from Boccaccio’s Alatiel (II.7) —the Saracen maiden is able to communi-
cate when she reaches the shores of England using her “corrupt Latin.”^2 In these
fictionalized encounters, Chaucer and Boccaccio draw upon a linguistic deus ex
machina to move their characters through terrain marked by linguistic complexity.
They seem not particularly interested in the nature of the language; but they know that
it, like Latin, has a robust, trans-regional valence.
Already, the constituent elements of the language emerge from this brief discussion
of nomenclature: the lingua franca is a vehicular language used as a means of com-
munication by people who do not share a mother tongue; it is essentially a simplified
Romance language, reproducing the grammar and much of the lexicon of Italian, but
takes lexica from other languages of the Mediterranean as well. Modern dictionary
definitions of the term “lingua franca” ratify these features as essential. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines the lingua franca as “Any language used for
communication between groups who have no other language in common: for exam-
ple, Swahili in much of East and Central Africa where it is not native” (Matthews,
2012). Crucial to this definition are two fundamental characteristics: the lingua
franca emerges from environments of linguistic complexity and serves to transcend
the linguistic divisions that thwart communication; and it is typically not the mother
tongue of any of those using it as communicative tool. The Oxford English Dictionary
definition of lingua franca emphasizes quite different elements of the language,
describing it as “a mixed language or jargon used in the Levant, consisting largely of
Italian words deprived of their inflexions” (OED Online, s.v. “lingua”). This defini-
tion elides the generic quality that is so important to the linguists, emphasizing instead
geo-historical specificity on the one hand and the lexical complexity of the language
on the other. The lingua franca cannot be defined as specific to one population; it
does not draw on any one linguistic source for its lexicon. It is the common possession
of a wide public. Those who use it as a cultural medium are obliged to shape their
mouths to the sound of its words, but in turn they leave their mark upon it.
Origins and early historyThe early history of the lingua franca has been much debated by scholars. There is
a sporadic history of texts—one or two per century between the thirteenth and
sixteenth centuries—that record various forms of hybrid languages, and that have in
the past been classified as lingua franca. To summarize ruthlessly but accurately,
scholars today agree that almost all of these records represent other linguistic phe-
nomena generated by the collision of the Latin–Romance, Greek and Arabic lan-
guage systems and that, while they are interesting in themselves, they have little to
do with the lingua franca as such. We do not possess substantial positive evidence
of the lingua franca until the opening decades of the seventeenth century, when