lingua franca 335
the language might be learned. Lingua franca, in this sense, seems close to what
Americans would call “kitchen Italian”—the non-standard language spoken by the
descendants of immigrants.
The textual recordMost of those who recorded the corpus of surviving lingua franca “texts” themselves
were speakers of a Romance language. Given the plasticity of the language—in par-
ticular, the distinct lexicon used in different parts of the Mediterranean—and the fact
that it had no written archive that might serve as the model for a standardized version
of the language, it seems inevitable that those who transcribed comments they over-
heard would bring their transcriptions closer to normative versions of the language
that they themselves spoke. Thus, a speaker of Spanish would be more likely to
remember and to record “hablar” than “parlar”—both are attested, as the verb
meaning “to speak” or “to say”—out of sensitivity both to his own linguistic habits
and to the expectations of his audience.
The extant lingua franca “corpus” consists of two distinct kinds of texts: literary
works in which a character speaks in lingua franca, and documentary historical
works—typically descriptions of voyages of one kind or another—which include
records of lingua franca conversations. The literary works provide the earliest witness
to the language, yet they are regarded as equivocal sources, because they make no
effort to represent themselves as accurate. They give us information about perceptions
of the language from the perspective of the emerging European national languages
(almost all of them were written in a Romance vernacular), and in some cases they
corroborate the evidence presented in the documentary sources. However, neither
linguists nor historians typically consider them to be reliable sources of information
about linguistic practice.
One of the earliest of these lingua franca texts appears in Fazio degli Uberti’s mid-
fourteenth century epic poem, the Dittamondo; and it is an unusual document, violat-
ing some of the “rules” that govern the use of lingua franca in both literary and
historical works. In this case, the language is identified as franchicá—an Italianization
of the Byzantine Greek frangkiká. The protagonist asks (in Greek words transliterated
into the Italian alphabet and adjusted to the demands of poetic meter), “do you speak
franchicá?” The Greek with whom he is speaking replies in the affirmative; and the
conversation switches to Italian.^5 In this case, atypically, the speaker of “lingua franca”
is the protagonist himself: this is the only instance I know of in which an author rep-
resents himself speaking lingua franca. The name which the poet gives it suggests
that he knows of the existence of a language, referred to as the language of the Franks,
which western Christians use to communicate with locals in the eastern Mediterranean.
However, the Italian conversation that follows must be understood in one of two
ways: either the (imagined) lingua franca conversation has been translated into Italian
to suit the author’s literary purpose; or franchicá should be understood, in this case,
to mean Italian.
Although this “document” is equivocal on so many levels, it serves as a useful
contrast to other early works that use lingua franca as literary voice. A love poem
typically referred to in modern scholarship as the “Contrasto della Zerbitana,”
addressed to and partly in the voice of a maiden from Djerba and dating to the early