Lingua Franca

The term lingua franca was first used in the Middle Ages to describe a language created from Italian and French to facilitate communication by Mediterranean travelers and traders. This original lingua franca blended simple nouns, verbs, and adjectives from both languages and over time it developed into an early version of a Romance language. Today, lingua franca describes a language that is commonly understood and widely used for communication among a group of people who speak different native languages. Selecting a lingua franca is often associated with conducting business as well as governing (or participating as a citizen in) a multilingual culture. Social, cultural, and political factors influence the selection of a lingua franca, and selection can be controversial as it involves selecting one language over others.

Background

Lingua franca (also lingue franche/langue franques) originally meant "language of the Franks," referring to all western Europeans (as opposed to Greeks). This original lingua franca was used in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages for trade, diplomacy, and piracy. Linguists would call it pidgin, a simplified blending of two or more languages to allow communication between incoming and native language groups. Pidgins often have a simple structure, few complex sentences, verbs in the infinitive form (e.g., to go), no plural nouns, no conjunctions, lack agreement between noun and adjective, and do not have person, gender, number, or case for nouns and pronouns. A lingua franca, like a pidgin, can tell social historians what was happening culturally and historically in a particular area.

The term eventually came to be used to describe a language that was chosen as a commonly understood language in a region with multiple native languages. Some of the first lingua francas in history under this new use of the term include Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Arabic. Aramaic predates Greek and Latin as a lingua franca. Aramaic was the language of the Persian empire, and large portions of the Bible and the Talmud were written in it. Aramaic has trace-roots in the twelfth century BCE as a Semitic language and was used as a lingua franca because of its connections to the Hebrew, Syriac, and Phoenician languages. Greek emerged in the second and third centuries CE to become the language of literature and philosophy and the original New Testament. For several centuries, Greek and Latin shared the role of lingua franca. The expanding Roman Empire made Latin the language of western and eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. Latin spawned the Romance languages that themselves became lingua francas, especially among European intellectuals up to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Arabic was also a lingua franca dating back to the seventh century and was used in China, India, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe through the expanse of the Islamic empire. Arabic became the lingua franca of science and diplomacy in the 1200s because, at that time, more books were written in Arabic than any other language.

Overview

France and England made their languages the lingua francas of their colonial empires across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, though their empires decreased greatly after World War II. The European Court of Justice and the Union Postale Internationale are conducted solely in French. Additionally, French is one lingua franca of the European Commission (with English and German), and of the European Court of Human Rights (with English). As with those of France and England, the colonial empires of the Spanish and the Portuguese led to the establishment of Spanish and Portuguese as lingua francas in South America over local indigenous languages. For Italy, it was political unification of the country in 1861 that established the Florentine dialect as what became known as standard Italian and thus the lingua franca of government and education. Elsewhere in Europe, Plattdeutsch, or so-called Low German, has become a lingua franca for uniting the different dialects of German spoken in northern Europe, while in the countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc, Russian is sustained as a lingua franca by Russian-language radio and television channels that are subsidized by the Russian government.

The colonial era also shaped lingua franca choices in Asia and Africa. For instance, India has around eight hundred spoken languages, and while Hindi is the federal official lingua franca, many citizens use English, a lingua franca from colonial times, in business and education. Similarly, in South Africa there are eleven officially recognized spoken languages, with a majority of the population using English and Afrikaans (a variation of Dutch) as lingua francas in public life. In China, seven to thirteen varieties of spoken Chinese require a written lingua franca (modern standard Chinese) and a spoken lingua franca (Mandarin Chinese). Both Chinese and Japanese were more common as lingua francas in East Asian countries before western colonization. Research by the PEW Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project found that English was becoming the lingua franca in Asia because it remained a politically more desirable solution than establishing one country’s language (e.g., China’s) as the lingua franca of other nations in the region.

English, fueled by technology and international business, has quickly become one of the world’s top lingua francas, leading to the coining of communication terminology such as "English as a lingua franca" (ELF) and "business English as a lingua franca" (BELF). Cultural critics have expressed a fear of a loss of non-English languages, cultures, and identities. Some critics support English as the top universal lingua franca, arguing that the English language is more gender and class neutral than other languages. Finally, there are those who regard English’s status as a lingua franca with pragmatism, reporting that they expect English to be replaced as a lingua franca once it no longer serves its purpose, as has been the case with other lingua francas in history.

There has never been one universal lingua franca, though this was the goal of Ludwik Zamenhof, who invented Esperanto, a constructed language using a modified Latin alphabet, Romance-inspired vocabulary, and extensive use of prefixes and suffixes. Esperanto was meant to overcome the problem of political neutrality with a lingua franca as it was, in theory, not the official language of any one nation or people. The language has not proven very popular, however. Critics argue that Esperanto could never be a lingua franca because it is a constructed language rather than a natural language. For its part, the United Nations has designated six languages as official lingua francas for their organization: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

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