334 karla mallette
relexification. The language could shed vocabulary and repopulate its lexicon with
words better suited to the demographics of a given time and place: more Spanish was
heard in the western Mediterranean and more Italian in the eastern Mediterranean;
more Greek lexica appear in the lingua francas of the Adriatic; over time, as France
became the great colonial power in the southern Mediterranean, more French vocab-
ulary was introduced. The lingua franca was a movable feast: less a clearly-defined
language than a template that could be pressed into service as needed, using current,
local linguistic raw materials.
If the grammatical structure and the lexicon are difficult to pin down, the origin of
the language is altogether lost in the mists of time. After about the year 1000 ce,
Italian ships dominated trans-Mediterranean trade. And the nature of the lingua
franca, in the few early written texts that survive, suggests that it must have been
generated by Italians traveling the Mediterranean circuit. It seems evident, given the
typical formation of pidgins and creoles, that Italian sailors and merchants spoke a
simplified form of their language to the locals in the port cities of the eastern and
southern Mediterranean where the language would later be attested. It became a
distinct language when the locals learned it and spoke it back to the “Franks” (cf.
Cifoletti, 1989: 38; Cifoletti, 2004: 23). The lingua franca was, as its name attests,
always a foreign language, always someone else’s tongue: from the perspective of local
populations, the language of the travelers; from the perspective of the sailors and
merchants, it was our language, as spoken by them.
The plasticity of the language and the ephemeral nature of the written record
can be accounted for by the simple fact that the lingua franca never creolized: that
is, it never became a mother tongue (although I can offer a sliver of evidence to the
contrary) and never became a written tongue. No one ever wrote a text in the lin-
gua franca. It appears in writing only as the record of an overheard conversation,
and almost always in the voice of another speaker; I am aware of only one text in
which a writer records the lingua franca as he himself spoke it. As we will see, some
bureaucratic records were written in Italian as “diplomatic” lingua franca. But
these constitute a distinct linguistic phenomenon—the business Italian of the early
modern Mediterranean—and do not behave like the lingua franca: the verbs are
conjugated (if not always correctly), the nouns and adjectives agree in gender and
number, and the vocabulary is more robust in some areas and less in others
(“proper” lingua franca includes a generous number of epithets, for instance,
largely derived from the words for dog in the tributary languages). Tantalizingly,
one early modern witness makes reference to the lingua franca as a language of
place, albeit only after its demise. Describing a village in the Crimea (Scuiritacci —I
have not been able to identify it) inhabited by the descendants of Genoese mer-
chants, Giovanni Botero writes: “Egl’è vero, che havendo perduta la lingua Franca,
hanno degenerato nella lingua, e ne’ costumi Tartareschi” (“It is true that, having
lost the lingua franca, they degenerated into Tartar language and customs:” Botero,
1596: 94). Unfortunately, this reference to the language—like a significant portion
of the early witnesses—was written by a man who did not himself travel to the
region he describes, and thus has little merit as historical evidence. Rather, it should
be taken as indicative of perceptions of the lingua franca in early modern Italy as
a degenerate spin-off of true Italian: the lingua franca suffered from lack of stand-
ardization and distance from the metropolitan centers where the regulated form of