338 karla mallette
of the French colonial government an anonymous lingua franca-to-French dictionary
appeared in Algeria in 1830. The editor of two modern editions of the dictionary,
Guido Cifoletti, has expressed a guarded skepticism about the accuracy of this docu-
ment; it seems to have been larded with French vocabulary, in an effort to bolster the
sketchy framework of the language (or the author’s sketchy knowledge of it).^8 Gerard
de Nerval, in Cairo in 1843, made tantalizing reference to studying two dictionaries
and a grammar of “ce qu’on appelle la langue franque:”^9 it is impossible to reconstruct,
at this distance, what documents he might have possessed.
We do, however, have abundant evidence of the use of Italian as another kind of
language of convenience. Written Italian was widely used as a bureaucratic language
in the early modern Mediterranean. A considerable quantity of documentation sur-
vives in the records of the French consulate in Tunis, in particular. When the records
were moved to France they were catalogued by Pierre Grandchamp; and Joseph
Cremona brought this archive to the attention of scholars, publishing a series of arti-
cles on it between 1996 and 2003. The French consulate acted as arbiter of the legal
interests of “Franks”—western Christians—in general, and thus was called upon to
adjudicate the affairs of men speaking a number of languages: French, Italian, Spanish,
Arabic, Greek, Turkish, and so on, in all their local variants. The consuls redacted
documents in one of two languages: either French or Italian. The variations between
the two make for fascinating study, following in part the language spoken by the par-
ties involved, in part the consular secretaries’ sensibility, and in part changing linguis-
tic fashions. Thus, in 1590, a Frenchman and a Turk draw up a contract in Italian
(Grandchamp, 1920–33: 2:20); in 1592, one man from Genoa and another from
Ragusa borrow money from one Turk to ransom another, and the contract is in
French (2:22); in 1602 a Cypriot received money on behalf of a Moorish woman liv-
ing in Palermo, and the contract is drawn up in Italian (2:6); again in 1602, a French
renegade and a Corsican draw up a contract in Italian (2:8); and so on. During the
first decade of the seventeenth century, some 1145 contracts were registered, 861 of
them in Italian and 284 in French.
Of the scholars who have written on the Mediterranean lingua franca, only John
Wansbrough has considered this bureaucratic Italian in continuity with the spoken
lingua franca. His magisterial volume Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean repur-
poses the term lingua franca to refer to “the several natural languages that served as
vehicle in the transfer, but also to the format [of commerce, trade and travel] itself”
(Wansbrough, 1996: vii). Taking as his point of departure Braudel’s notion of the
circuits of trade essential to Mediterranean economic life, Wansbrough studies a rep-
ertoire of linguistic and conceptual tools used over the (relatively) longue durée to
facilitate, legislate and profit from the movement of people and merchandise through
the Mediterranean basin. Because of its breadth, the volume makes for a disconcert-
ing read (Wansbrough regularly ranges through millennia and through multiple,
widely-divergent language systems in a single paragraph). But it also can serve as a
crucial conceptual sourcebook for historians studying the linguistic matrix of
Mediterranean connectivity.
One could add much detail but little substance to this rapid-fire survey of the
language. We possess a sporadic history of documentation—from the merest casual
mentions of the language to citations, in both literary and documentary texts, to
definitions and descriptions of it—between the late Middle Ages and the late