336 karla mallette
fourteenth century, follows a late medieval literary style by allowing the female
beloved to speak in her own linguistic register, a voice less elevated than the male lover’s.
Like the Genoese lady in Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’s Occitan descort or the Sicilian lady
in Cielo d’Alcamo’s Italian contrasto, the lady in this anonymous poem parries her
lover’s advances in her own earthy dialect; in the “Contrasto della Zerbitana,” the
poet-lover himself is drawn into her orbit, and speaks her language in order to court
her (Cifoletti, 1989: 215–217). Scholars do not count this poem as true lingua
franca but rather as a literary offshoot of the incipient (and short-lived) pidginiza-
tion of Italian on the island of Djerba, ruled by Sicily from 1284 until 1334. Between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, lingua franca becomes more common in
literary works. Spaniard Juan del Encina composed a poem in the voice of a lingua
franca-speaking merchant of the Holy Land after his return from pilgrimage in 1520
(Cifoletti, 1989: 218–221). During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a
number of plays—including, most famously, Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme”
and six of Goldoni’s plays—include dialogue in lingua franca (Cifoletti, 1989:
222–227 and 235–240). And, in keeping with the fashion for dialect poetry in Italy,
two mid-eighteenth-century poems—one written in the voice of an Armenian
merchant, the other of an itinerant Turk—use the lingua franca as a way to allow a
character to be foreign and, at the same time, to speak Italian (Cifoletti, 1989: 241–245).
In all cases, these texts put the lingua franca in the mouths of extra-communitarians
who are knitted into the community thanks to romantic, political or economic ties.
In the English-language theater, the lingua franca was recognized as a mark of
outsiders and scam artists (a harbinger of its later role as a progenitor of Polari). In a
theatrical version of the Machiavelli short story Belfagor created for the English
stage, the demons speak lingua franca (Wilson, 1691: 39). And in Dryden’s
Limberham, a character on the make uses lingua franca to baffle an amiable but
addled older man (Dryden, 1735: 302–304).
The earliest literary “records” of the language date to the fourteenth century. With
very few exceptions, the earliest documentary records—works which quote characters
speaking in the language, rather than simply naming the language as one spoken in a
given region—date to a full two centuries later. And these early lingua franca “texts”
are almost all of vanishing brevity, typically no more than a single sentence, a handful
of words or even a single word in length. In 1528, in Tunis, a chorus of “Moors”
mourns the recent death of a local Italian with the words “O don Ugo, ti venir a Zerbi
e Tunesi” (“O Don Ugo, you come to Djerba and Tunis;” Cortelazzo, 1965: 110).
During the last decade of the sixteenth century an English sailor drinking in a tavern
in Rhodes was approached by “tow stout Turkes” who asked “Parlye Francko, sinyore?
which is: Can ye speake Ittallian, sinyor?” (Kahane, 1976: 35). In 1574, Bartolomeo
Ruffino—a legal expert from Savoy—was captured when the naval forces of ‘Uluj ‘Ali
defeated the Christians at La Goulette and Tunis. He records a ploy by two renegades
who gain entrance to the Christians’ fortifications, in the course of the siege, by iden-
tifying themselves in response to the sentinel’s inquiry as “amici” (“friends”). Ruffino
identifies this word as “lingua franca e italiana” (Sebag, 1971: 74). He could, plau-
sibly, mean that they are speaking in clear Italian; the Italian adjective franco could
connote “unencumbered, straightforward, sincere.” However, in the context, this
interpretation seems unlikely.^6 As renegades, the men are construed in the text as
extra-communitarians. And their act of aggression against the Christian camp—once