340 karla mallette
The language, thus, seems to have had a wide but discontinuous valence among
transient populations in the Mediterranean. It would have a robust conceptual
afterlife as a symbol of the triumph of language over cultural differences: viewed, in
a sense, as a ghost of Latinity, emerging as Latin itself retracted to become the idi-
olect of the Roman Catholic church. One late-eighteenth-century writer represents
it as a trans-regional mega-language: “a kind of dialect, which, without being the
proper language of any country on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, has a kind
of universal currency over all that quarter of the world” (Carey, 1794: 14). Another
views it as trans-historical: it “appeared to be the shreds and clippings of all the
tongues, dead and living, ever spoken since the creation” (Tyler, 1797: 2:67). And
a third sees it as “that barbarous jargon which serves to render Italian so useful in
every part of the Mediterranean” (Galt, 1813: 22). The lingua franca was both
language and a negation of meaningful speech—a “barbarous jargon”; both cultur-
ally or ethnically specific—identified most often as Italian—and transnational. Like
Latin, the lingua franca emerges from these descriptions as a trans-regional and
trans-historical super-language; a professional jargon not learned as a mother
tongue, but rather studied by a certain segment of the population as a tool of their
trade; a language that did not saturate a given territory (as a national language or,
in the pre-modern context, a vernacular is understood to do) but rather would be
acquired by those who had need for it: merchants, corsairs, slaves and slave masters,
dragomans, and so on.
Afterlife of the lingua francaThe lingua franca would have a long residual half-life beyond the early modern
Mediterranean: it survived into the nineteenth century in the Mediterranean and
in the metropolises of the Mediterranean empires. It served as one of the models
for Polari (the name is a corruption of the Italian parlare, to speak), a form of
British cant;^13 still, in the mid-nineteenth century, a command of Greek, Turkish or
lingua franca was considered a professional necessity for British army clerks and
storekeepers in the eastern Mediterranean.^14 Nineteenth-century travelers (like
Nerval, for instance, or Edward William Lane [Thompson, 2010: 27]) report hear-
ing some version of Italian or lingua franca in the streets of Cairo. In the empire
cinema of Fascist-era Italy—movies set in the Italian colonies in Libya and east
Africa—native characters speak an elevated pidgin Italian which seems to derive
both from standard pidginization strategies (use of the infinitive rather than con-
jugated verbs, for instance) and a historical memory of the lingua franca.^15 A 2012
New York Times article quotes a woman in Beirut celebrating the end (for the
moment) of Lebanon’s troubles, in a combination of Italian and Arabic which an
experienced eye has no difficulty recognizing as a distant descendant of lingua
franca: “Finito la mishkila!”—“No more problems!”^16 And the phrase “lingua
franca” has wide valence as a description of cultural expressions that transcend
petty tribal divisions. In the song “1–2–3–4,” Coolio raps “This is some of the
lingua franca of the funk business”; and an article in Spin magazine refers to
hip-hop as cultural lingua franca.^17
The Mediterranean lingua franca provides an extraordinarily ephemeral and fleet-
ing object of historical analysis, yet one that paradoxically endured for centuries and