Lingua franca Totally Explained

A lingua franca (Italian literally meaning Frankish language, see etymology below) is any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers. The de facto status of lingua franca is usually "awarded" by the masses to the language of the most influential nation(s) of the time. Any given language normally becomes a lingua franca primarily by being used for international commerce, but can be accepted in other cultural exchanges, especially diplomacy. Lingua franca sometimes refers to the de facto language within a more or less specialized field, such as international radio communications (English).
A synonym for lingua franca is “vehicular language.” Whereas a vernacular language is used as a native language in a single speaker community, a vehicular language goes beyond the boundaries of its original community, and is used as a second language for communication between communities. For example, English is a vernacular in England, but is used as a vehicular language (that is, a lingua franca), say, in India.
The term lingua franca is also applied to international auxiliary languages meant specifically for communication between speakers of different native languages. Examples include Esperanto, Interlingua, Latino Sine Flexione, and Novial.

European languages

Greek and Latin

During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the linguae francae were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe and Middle East where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was used as the basis of the Church. This was later changed to local languages, although it's still the official language of the Vatican.

Sabir and Italian

Originally "Lingua Franca" (also known as Sabir) referred to a mix of mostly Italian with a broad vocabulary drawn from Persian, French, Greek and Arabic. Lingua Franca literally means "Frankish language". This originated from the Arabic custom of referring to all Europeans as Franks. This mixed language (pidgin, creole language) was used for communication throughout the medieval and early modern Middle East as a diplomatic language; the generic description "lingua franca" has since become common for any language used by speakers of different languages to communicate with one another. Some samples of Sabir have been preserved in Molière's comedy, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
Italian dialects were spoken in medieval times as lingua franca in the European commercial empires of Italian cities (Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan, Pisa, Siena, Amalfi) and in their colonies located in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean sea. During the Renaissance, Italian was also spoken as language of culture in the main royal courts of Europe and among intellectuals. The Italian language is still used as a lingua franca in some environments. For example, in the Catholic ecclesiastic hierarchy, Italian is known by a large part of members and is used in substitution of Latin in some official documents as well. The presence of Italian as the second official language in Vatican City indicates its use not only in the seat in Rome, but also anywhere in the world where an episcopal seat is present.

Spanish

Spanish replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy and (in some aspects) culture during the 16th and 17th centuries, until it was replaced by French. Spanish was also used throughout the former Spanish Empire, particularly in Central and South America, and became the lingua franca of the Philippines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, it's a lingua franca in Latin America (except for Brazil and the Guianas); and in Equatorial Guinea, along with French.

French

French was the language of diplomacy in Europe from the 17th century until its recent replacement by English, and as a result is still a working language of international institutions and is seen on documents ranging from passports to airmail letters. For many years, until the accession of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark in 1973, French and German were the only official working languages of the European Economic Community.
French was also the language used among the educated in many cosmopolitan cities across the Middle East and North Africa. This was true in cities such as Cairo, around the turn of the century until World War II, and especially in the French colonies of the Maghreb. French is particularly important in Algeria and its capital Algiers. Until the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon, French was the language that the upper classes of Lebanese society used by way of "civilised language". French is still a lingua franca in most Western and Central African countries (where it often enjoys official status), a remnant of France's and Belgium’s colonial times. These African countries, together with several other countries throughout the world, are members of Francophonie.

German

German served as a lingua franca in large portions of Europe, America and small parts of Asia, (Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan) during the 19th and 20th centuries in the sciences — particularly in physics, chemistry and sociology — as well as in business and politics. German was also spoken in much of Eastern Europe long after the end of World War II. In some academic disciplines, most notably philosophy and theology, a reading knowledge of German is still considered essential and required of doctoral candidates by some universities all over the world, not just those in Europe. During the construction of the Snowy Mountain River Scheme in Australia, German was the lingua franca for workers from central and east Europe.

Polish

Polish was a kind of lingua franca in various regions of Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although Russian language influence has almost completely substituted the Polish language during the 19th and 20th century, Polish is still sometimes spoken or at least understood in western border areas of Ukraine, Belarus and parts of northern Slovakia.

Portuguese

Portuguese served as lingua franca in Africa, South America and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries. When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of Lingua Franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crew tried to learn this "broken Portuguese". Through a process of change the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon was replaced with the languages of the people in contact.
Portuguese remains an important lingua franca in Africa (PALOP), Macau, East Timor, and to a certain extent in South America because Brazil is the largest and most populous country in Latin America.

Russian

Russian is in use and widely understood in areas of Central and Eastern Europe and Northern and Central Asia formerly part of the Soviet Union, or of the former Soviet bloc. Recent migrations from the former Soviet Union made Russian one of the most spoken languages in Israel.

English

English is the current lingua franca of international business, science, technology and aviation, and has displaced French as the lingua franca of diplomacy since World War I. It arguably was advanced by the role of English-speaking countries, in particular the United States, as well as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia in the aftermath of World War II, particularly in the organization and procedure of the United Nations. It was first and still is a lingua franca of former British Empire (including India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, and Vanuatu), present British territories (like Bermuda, Falkland Islands, and Saint Helena), former British territories (like Hong Kong), U.S. territories (like Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico), Virgin Islands (both British- and American-owned), and Philippines.
   The modern trend to use English outside of English-speaking countries has a number of sources. Ultimately, the use of English in a variety of locations across the globe is a consequence of the reach of the British Empire. But the establishment of English as an international lingua franca after World War II was mostly a result of the spread of English via cultural and technological exports from the United States as well as its embedding in international institutions; for instance, the seating and roll-call order in sessions of the United Nations and its organs is determined by English alphabetical order, and, while there are six official languages of the United Nations, only two (English and French) are working languages, and, in practice, English is the sole working language of most UN bodies. This is also due to the fact that the majority of UN bodies are in the United States.
   English is also regarded by some as the global lingua franca owing to the economic hegemony of most of the developed Western nations in world financial and business institutions. The de facto status of English as the lingua franca in these countries has carried over globally as a result.
   A landmark recognition of the dominance of English in Europe came in 1995 when, on the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden, English joined French and German as one of the working languages of the European Commission. Many Europeans outside of the EU have also adopted English as their current lingua franca. For example, English serves as a somewhat lingua franca in Switzerland, which has four official languages (German, French, Italian, plus Romansh, spoken by a relatively small minority). German is also spoken by many Swiss citizens, but the relatively high foreign-born population (21% of residents) ensures a relatively wide use of English.

Asian languages

In Asia, these are the most important lingua franca:

Arabic

Arabic, the native language of the Arabs, who originally came from the Arabian Peninsula, became the "lingua franca" of the Islamic Empire (Arab Empire) (from AD 700 - AD 1492), which at a certain point spread from the borders of China and Northern India through Central Asia, Persia, Asia Minor, Middle East, North Africa all the way to Spain and Portugal in the west. Arabic was also used by people neighboring the Islamic Empire. It influenced African sub-Saharan languages, east African languages, such as Swahili and loaned many words to Persian, Turkish, Urdu and to some extent to European languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. Arabic script was adopted by many other languages such as Urdu, Persian, Swahili (changed to Latin in the late 19th century) and Turkish which switched to Latin script in 1928. Arabic became the lingua franca of these regions mainly because it was the language of the Qur’an, Islam's holy book. Arabic remains as the lingua franca for 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, in addition to Chad.

Aramaic

Aramaic, the native language of the Arameans, became the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire and the western provinces of the Persian Empire, mainly because of its simple, alphabetic writing system (of which the modern Hebrew alphabet is little more than a stylized form), more useful in administration than cuneiform.

Azerbaijani

According to the Russian historian Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Azeri served as a lingua franca throughout most parts of Transcaucasia (except the Black Sea coast), in Eastern Anatolia, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Southern Dagestan.

Cebuano

Cebuano is spoken natively by the inhabitants of Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental and some parts of Leyte and the Samar islands and throughout Mindanao. It is also spoken in a few towns and islands in Samar. Until 1975, Cebuano surpassed Tagalog in terms of number of native speakers. Some dialects of Cebuano give different names to the language. Residents of Bohol may refer to Cebuano as Bol-anon while Cebuano-speakers in Leyte may call their dialect Kana. It is also spoken by Warays in Samar and Leyte, Porohanon in Poro, Ilonggos in Negros Oriental, Eskaya in Bohol, and by native (like Atas, Bagobos, and Butuanons) and migrant Filipino ethnic groups (like Ilocanos and Ilonggos), and foreign ethnic groups (like Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) in Mindanao as second language.

Chinese

Classical Chinese previously served as both a written lingua franca and diplomatic language in Far East Asia, used by China, Korea, Japan, the Ryukyus, and Vietnam in interstate communications. In the early 20th century Classical Chinese in China was replaced by modern written Standard Chinese. Currently, among most Chinese-speaking communities, Standard Mandarin serves the function of providing a common spoken language between speakers of different and mutually unintelligible Chinese spoken languages - not to mention between the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups in China. Written Chinese has also been used as a way of communication through these character-using countries. Chinese is also a lingua franca of Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore.

Filipino

Filipino, a standardized variety of Tagalog, serves as a lingua franca throughout the Philippines archipelago together with some Spanish words and English language. In the southern regions though, the Cebuano language and English Language is more used as a lingua franca than Filipino.

Hindi - Urdu

Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu, is commonly spoken in India and Pakistan. It encompasses two standardized registers in the form of the official languages of Hindi and Urdu, as well as several nonstandard dialects. Hindi is one of the official languages and lingua franca of India, and Urdu is the official language and lingua franca of Pakistan. Urdu is also an official language in India.

Ilokano

Ilokano is natively spoken in Ilocos Region, northwest Philippines. Ilokanos migrated to Batanes, Cordillera, Cagayan Valley, and Pangasinan until it's now the lingua franca of northern Philippines.

Malay and Indonesian

In the 14th century, during the Malacca Sultanate, Malay was used as a lingua franca in the Malay archipelago, by the locals as much as by the traders and artisans that stopped at Malacca via the Straits of Malacca. Nowadays, Malay is used mostly in Malaysia (officially called Bahasa Malaysia) and Brunei, as well as - but to a lesser extent in - Singapore (one out of their four official languages).
However, Indonesian, a standardized variety of Malay, serves as a lingua franca throughout Indonesia and East Timor. While Indonesia counts several hundred different languages, Indonesian, the official language of Indonesia, is their vehicular language.

Persian

Persian served as the lingua franca of the eastern Islamic world and became the second lingua franca of the Islamic World. Besides serving as the state and administrative language in many Islamic dynasties, some of which included Samanids, Ghurids, Ghaznavids, Ilkhanids, Seljuqids, Moguls and early Ottomans, Persian cultural and political forms, and often the Persian language were used by the cultural elites from the Balkans to India. Arnold Joseph Toynbee's assessment of the role of the Persian language is worth quoting in more detail:

In the Iranic world, before it began to succumb to the process of Westernization, the New Persian language, which had been fashioned into literary form in mighty works of art. . . gained a currency as a lingua franca; and at its widest, about the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian Era, its range in this role extended, without a break, across the face of South-Eastern Europe and South-Western Asia.

Persian remains the lingua franca in its native homelands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan and was the lingua franca of India before the British conquest. It is still understood by many intellectuals of India and Pakistan.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit was widely used across South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia at various times in ancient and medieval history; it has religious significance for all those religious traditions that arose from the Vedic religion.

Tetum

Tetum, official language of East Timor (along with Portuguese), is a lingua franca of Timor island.

African languages

Hausa

Hausa is widely spoken through Nigeria and Niger and recognised in neighbouring states (Ghana, Benin, Cameroon etc). The reason for this is that Hausa people used to be traders who led caravans with goods (cotton, leather, slaves, food crops etc.) through the whole West African region, from the Niger Delta to the Atlantic shores at the very west edge of Africa. They also reached North African states through Trans-Saharan routes. Thus trade deals in Timbuktu in modern Mali, Agadez, Ghat, Fez in Northern Africa, and other trade centers were often concluded in Hausa.

Swahili

Swahili is used throughout large parts of East Africa as a lingua franca, despite being the mother tongue of a relatively small ethnic group on the East African coast and nearby islands in the Indian Ocean. At least as early as the late eighteenth century, Swahili was used along trading and slave routes that extended west across Lake Tanganyika and into the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. Swahili rose in prominence throughout the colonial era, and has become the predominant African language of Tanzania and Kenya. Some contemporary members of non-Swahili ethnic groups speak Swahili more often than their mother tongues, and many choose to raise their children with Swahili as their first language, leading to the possibility that several smaller East African languages will fade as Swahili transitions from being a regional lingua franca to a regional first language.

Zulu

South Africa has eleven official languages, however the mutual intelligibility of many Nguni languages (Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi and Ndebele) has meant that Zulu is increasingly becoming a lingua franca throughout Eastern South Africa, including the major cities of Durban and Johannesburg. Zulu is the first language of ten million people, but is spoken as a second language by over 25 million in the region and is now the most commonly understood language in the country.

Fula

Fula, also known as Pulaar or Fulfulde depending on the region, is the language of the Fula people – who in turn are known under the various names of Fula or Fulani or Peuls or Fulbe or Fulɓe or Toucouleur. Fula is spoken in all countries directly south of the Sahara (north of Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Mali…). It is spoken mainly by Fula people, but is also used as a lingua franca by several populations of various origin, throughout Western Africa.

Manding

The largely interintelligible Manding languages of West Africa serve as lingua francas in various places. For instance Bambara is the most widely spoken language in Mali, and Jula (almost the same as Bambara) is commonly used in western Burkina Faso and northern Cote d'Ivoire. Manding languages have long been used in regional commerce, so much so that the word for trader, jula, was applied to the language currently known by the same name. Other varieties of Manding are used in several other countries, such as Guinea, The Gambia, and Senegal.

Sango

The Sango language is a lingua franca developed for intertribal trading in the Central African Republic. It is based on the Northern Ngbandi language spoken by the Sango people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo but with a large vocabulary of French loan words.

Wolof

Wolof is a more widely spoken lingua franca of The Gambia and Senegal, although English and French, the official languages of The Gambia and Senegal, are the lingua francas of the urban areas of the 2 countries.

Amerindian languages

Mobilian Jargon

The Mobilian Trade Language was developed and used along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas. It was a creole named for the Mabila (Mobile) tribe, which spoke Alibamu (Alabama), but it was more based on Choctaw.

Tupi

The Tupi language served as the lingua franca of Brazil among speakers of the various indigenous languages, mainly in the coastal regions. Tupi as a lingua franca, and as recorded in colonial books, was in fact a creation of the Portuguese, who assembled it from the similarities between the coastal indigenous Tupi-guarani languages. The language served the Jesuit priests as a way to teach natives, and it was widely spoken by Europeans. It was the predominant language spoken in Brazil until 1758, when the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese government and the use and teaching of Tupi was banned. Since then, Tupi as Lingua Franca was quickly replaced by Portuguese, although Tupi-guarani family languages are still spoken by small native groups in Brazil.

Quechua

As the Inca empire rose to prominence in South America, the imperial language Quechua became the most widely spoken language in the western regions of the continent. Even among tribes that were not absorbed by the empire Quechua still became an important language for trade because of the empire's influence. Even after the Spanish conquest of Peru Quechua for a long time was the most common language. Today it's still widely spoken although it has given way to Spanish as the more common lingua franca.

Creoles

Various pidgin languages have been used in many locations and times as a common trade speech. They can be based on English, French, Chinese, or indeed any other language. A pidgin is defined by its use as a lingua franca, between populations speaking other mother tongues. When a pidgin becomes a population's first language, then it's called a creole language.

Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin is largely spoken in Papua New Guinea as a lingua franca. It developed as an English-based creole with influences from local languages and to a smaller extent German or Unserdeutsch and Portuguese. Tok Pisin originated as a pidgin in the 19th century, hence the name 'Tok Pisin' from 'Talk Pidgin', but has now evolved into a modern language.

Bislama

Bislama is used in Vanuatu. It is one of the local varieties of the English-based Melanesian Pidgin that developed throughout Melanesia during the 19th century.

Guinea-Bissau Creole

Guinea-Bissau Creole is a Portuguese Creole used as a lingua franca of Guinea-Bissau and Casamance, Senegal among people of different ethnic groups. It is also the mother tongue of many people in Guinea-Bissau.

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