A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chapter twenty-One

Commend me to honest lingua franca. Why, this is enough to stun a Christian, with your Hebrew, and your Greek, and such like Latin. (Dryden, Limberham; or, The Kind Keeper, 356)

The lingua franca—a language of convenience used by speakers of mutually- incomprehensible mother tongues, mainly Arabic, Turkish, Greek and the Romance vernaculars, in the pre-modern Mediterranean—makes a peculiarly chimeric object of scholarly analysis. Because it never became a written language, it left no paper trail beyond snatches of dialogue recorded by travelers through the Mediterranean. And almost without exception, those brief and equivocal “texts” are colored by the condi-tions in which they were recorded: most typically, narratives of captivity, brigandage or some less salacious but still fraught adventure at sea. Furthermore, any exchange overheard and recorded by a traveler will inevitably have been made to conform to the writer’s own grammatical, lexical and orthographic habits—which, in an era that pre-dated standardized grammar and orthography, may themselves be fluid and unpre-dictable. Finally, men caught in the sorts of exchanges where the lingua franca would be used—conversations between corsairs and captives, for instance—do not make the most dispassionate and objective witnesses. Writing a thorough and accurate account of the language might seem (with only a slight stretch of the imagination) like using musical notation to score the sound of the waves.

In this essay, I will survey what is known and what seems unknowable about the language, from its first appearances in the historical record to its afterlife as a memory of a provisional form of communication across linguistic boundaries. Despite the spo-radic nature of the historical record, it seems obvious that some form of linguistic accommodation must be made to facilitate trade in the pre-modern Mediterranean. The lingua franca responds in a general way to this exigency, and more specifically to the historical conditions of trade and travel in the Mediterranean between roughly 1000 and 1800 Ce. In brief, the lingua franca is a necessary condition for Mediterranean commerce, and Mediterranean connectivity in general, but the Mediterranean is not

Lingua franca

Karla Mallette

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a necessary condition for it. The historical specifics of the language—the form that it took, as well as its name—are peculiar to the Mediterranean. But the creation of a mixed contact language and its use to support the movement of people and merchan-dise is not.

Writing in an elite environment (and in a learned form of the language which, in a more popular register, generated the lingua franca), Baldassare Castiglione wrote: “commerce between diverse nations has always had the effect of transporting new words from one to the other, almost as merchandise is transported” (Castiglione, 1991: 7)—a succinct and elegant summary of the dynamic of circulation that gener-ated the lingua franca. Words move like merchandise from one nation to another, and the language itself serves a more exalted function: so essential to all forms of com-merce and human mobility that we might see it as a form of currency itself, both an exigency—a necessary precondition for Mediterranean connectivity—and contingent, in its formal linguistic characteristics.

Nomenclature

The name most frequently used for the language in the historical sources—lingua franca – effectively captures the dynamics of Mediterranean circulation in the linguis-tic context. The term is typically recognized as either Italian (generating a standard Italian plural, lingue franche) or as a Latin phrase naturalized in English language scholarship (producing the plural lingua francas). The noun lingua is unproblematic. In both Italian and Latin it means tongue, in either the anatomical or abstract sense, and here signifies “language.” The formation of the adjective franca, however, is more complex: it is a Romance borrowing of an Arabic borrowing of a Greek borrow-ing of a Latin word. The word emerged from the murky depths onto the stage of history as the ethnonym which the Romans used for the Germanic tribes beyond the Alps, presumably derived from the Franks’ own name for themselves. After the coro-nation of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as emperor of the western empire, Byzantines used the term phrangoi—a Greek appropriation of the Latin Franci—to refer to western Christians in general. The Arabs acquired the term from the Byzantines, and used it in an Arabized form (ifranjı) to refer to western Christians. And western Christians themselves learned the word when they started to travel in the Levant in large numbers, during the era of the Crusades (Kahane, 1976; Cifoletti, 1989: 5–6). Frank (in whatever linguistic coloration it occurred) consistently meant western Christians, sometimes Romance-speaking western Christians in particular, as viewed by either Byzantine Christians or Arabs. Finally, during the sixteenth century, the adjective was attached to the noun lingua. The term lingua franca—the language of the Franks, the western Christians—referred to a language of convenience used throughout the Mediterranean, essentially a simplified form of Italian with an infusion of vocabulary from other languages, especially Arabic and Spanish.

However, a dazzling number of other terms might be used to refer to the language in the sources—an early indication of the vaguely-defined nature of the language itself: franco or piccolo franco; “bad Italian” (italien corroumpu or italien baragouïné in the French sources, italiano corrotto in Italian);1 Antoine Galland (1646–1715), best known as translator of the 1001 Nights, would refer to it as “un certain langage par mi et ti” (“a certain language using ‘mi’ and ‘ti’”; Dakhlia, 2008: 267); French-language

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sources from colonial Algeria call it sabir. At times, in medieval Italian narratives, it seems possible that references to Italian and even to Latin might indicate the presence of the lingua franca. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, “latino” is spoken both by a Sicilian maiden washed up on the shores of Tunisia (V.2) and by Saladin and his men when they travel through the European countryside (IX.9). If it seems extremely unlikely that the great Arab sultan would speak common lingua franca, the notion that a Sicilian girl would speak Latin is equally far-fetched. In Chaucer’s Man of Law’s tale—borrowed from Boccaccio’s Alatiel (II.7) —the Saracen maiden is able to communi-cate when she reaches the shores of England using her “corrupt Latin.”2 In these fictionalized encounters, Chaucer and Boccaccio draw upon a linguistic deus ex machina to move their characters through terrain marked by linguistic complexity. They seem not particularly interested in the nature of the language; but they know that it, like Latin, has a robust, trans-regional valence.

Already, the constituent elements of the language emerge from this brief discussion of nomenclature: the lingua franca is a vehicular language used as a means of com-munication by people who do not share a mother tongue; it is essentially a simplified Romance language, reproducing the grammar and much of the lexicon of Italian, but takes lexica from other languages of the Mediterranean as well. Modern dictionary definitions of the term “lingua franca” ratify these features as essential. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines the lingua franca as “Any language used for communication between groups who have no other language in common: for exam-ple, Swahili in much of East and Central Africa where it is not native” (Matthews, 2012). Crucial to this definition are two fundamental characteristics: the lingua franca emerges from environments of linguistic complexity and serves to transcend the linguistic divisions that thwart communication; and it is typically not the mother tongue of any of those using it as communicative tool. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of lingua franca emphasizes quite different elements of the language, describing it as “a mixed language or jargon used in the Levant, consisting largely of Italian words deprived of their inflexions” (OED Online, s.v. “lingua”). This defini-tion elides the generic quality that is so important to the linguists, emphasizing instead geo-historical specificity on the one hand and the lexical complexity of the language on the other. The lingua franca cannot be defined as specific to one population; it does not draw on any one linguistic source for its lexicon. It is the common possession of a wide public. Those who use it as a cultural medium are obliged to shape their mouths to the sound of its words, but in turn they leave their mark upon it.

Origins and early history

The early history of the lingua franca has been much debated by scholars. There is a sporadic history of texts—one or two per century between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries—that record various forms of hybrid languages, and that have in the past been classified as lingua franca. To summarize ruthlessly but accurately, scholars today agree that almost all of these records represent other linguistic phe-nomena generated by the collision of the Latin–Romance, Greek and Arabic lan-guage systems and that, while they are interesting in themselves, they have little to do with the lingua franca as such. We do not possess substantial positive evidence of the lingua franca until the opening decades of the seventeenth century, when

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three European travelers describing three different parts of the Arabic-speaking world each produced a fairly detailed description of the language. François Savary de Brèves was the French consul to Constantinople, and his aide Jacques du Castel wrote an account of his journey to Tunis in 1604 to sort out some difficulties that had arisen with the corsairs there. In describing Tripoli (in the east) he includes an account of the lingua franca, which he calls “Italian, but a corrupt speech, or more precisely a jargon” (“Italien, mais un parle corroumpu, ou pour mieux dire un iar-gon”; Savary de Brèves, 1628: 39).3 Antonio de Sosa—a Portuguese traveler taken captive and held in the bagnio in Algiers from 1577 until 1581—mentioned the language among those current in Algiers and recorded a number of comments in the lingua franca in a Spanish-language memoir published posthumously in 1612. He refers to it as “what the Moors and Turks call franca, or hablar franco.”4 And Pietro della Valle described the lingua franca in a letter that he wrote about his visit to Damascus in 1616; he called it “Italian—that is, that bastard Italian … which in these parts of the Orient they call franco piccolo” (Della Valle, 1843: 1:320). These early witnesses to the language disagree about what to call it. But the language they describe in each case is the same: a simplified form of Romance used to communi-cate between speakers of diverse languages in the bagnios of the Barbary Republics and the markets of the Levant.

None of these early descriptions give us enough detail to allow us to reconstruct the language. Of the early sources, I cite Savary’s, because it is the most succinct and detailed of the three, and because it is much less often cited than Sosa’s:

[I]l est bien composé de termes Italiens, mais sans liaison, sans ordre, ny syntaxe, ne gardant és noms la concordance des genres, meslans les masculins avec les feminins, & ne prenant des verbes, que les infinitifs, pour tous temps & personnes, avec les pronoms, mi, & ti : neantmoins on les entend aussi bien que s’ils y observoient toutes les reigles de grammaire, & faut que ceux qui ont affaire avec eux, en usent de mesme, s’ils veulent estre entendus. (Savary de Brèves, 1628: 39)

(It is composed of Italian words, but without connection, order, or syntax; not respect-ing, in the case of nouns, the agreement of gender, but mixing masculine with feminine; and using only the infinitive of the verb for all tenses and persons, with the pronouns “mi” and “ti”; nevertheless they are understood just as well as if they observed all the rules of grammar, and it is necessary that those who do business with them use the same (language), if they wish to be understood.)

Early descriptions largely concur with Savary’s—the lingua franca consisted of nouns without markers of gender or number and infinitives without the terminations that designate tense, mood, voice and person—although they are not always so frank in describing it as simplified Italian. As we have seen, Pietro della Valle also calls it Italian. But Sosa refers to it as “a mixture of various Christian languages, largely Italian and Spanish words with some recently added Portuguese terms, since a great number of Portuguese captives were brought to Algiers from Tétouan and Fès after the king of Portugal, Don Sebastian, lost the battle in Morocco” (Sosa, 2011: 185). Sosa was, naturally, more sensitive to the Portuguese words which have entered the language recently, because he himself came from Portugal and was (one assumes) a native speaker of Portuguese. Here he describes the effect that linguists would call

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relexification. The language could shed vocabulary and repopulate its lexicon with words better suited to the demographics of a given time and place: more Spanish was heard in the western Mediterranean and more Italian in the eastern Mediterranean; more Greek lexica appear in the lingua francas of the Adriatic; over time, as France became the great colonial power in the southern Mediterranean, more French vocab-ulary was introduced. The lingua franca was a movable feast: less a clearly-defined language than a template that could be pressed into service as needed, using current, local linguistic raw materials.

If the grammatical structure and the lexicon are difficult to pin down, the origin of the language is altogether lost in the mists of time. After about the year 1000 Ce, Italian ships dominated trans-Mediterranean trade. And the nature of the lingua franca, in the few early written texts that survive, suggests that it must have been generated by Italians traveling the Mediterranean circuit. It seems evident, given the typical formation of pidgins and creoles, that Italian sailors and merchants spoke a simplified form of their language to the locals in the port cities of the eastern and southern Mediterranean where the language would later be attested. It became a distinct language when the locals learned it and spoke it back to the “Franks” (cf. Cifoletti, 1989: 38; Cifoletti, 2004: 23). The lingua franca was, as its name attests, always a foreign language, always someone else’s tongue: from the perspective of local populations, the language of the travelers; from the perspective of the sailors and merchants, it was our language, as spoken by them.

The plasticity of the language and the ephemeral nature of the written record can be accounted for by the simple fact that the lingua franca never creolized: that is, it never became a mother tongue (although I can offer a sliver of evidence to the contrary) and never became a written tongue. No one ever wrote a text in the lin-gua franca. It appears in writing only as the record of an overheard conversation, and almost always in the voice of another speaker; I am aware of only one text in which a writer records the lingua franca as he himself spoke it. As we will see, some bureaucratic records were written in Italian as “diplomatic” lingua franca. But these constitute a distinct linguistic phenomenon—the business Italian of the early modern Mediterranean—and do not behave like the lingua franca: the verbs are conjugated (if not always correctly), the nouns and adjectives agree in gender and number, and the vocabulary is more robust in some areas and less in others (“proper” lingua franca includes a generous number of epithets, for instance, largely derived from the words for dog in the tributary languages). Tantalizingly, one early modern witness makes reference to the lingua franca as a language of place, albeit only after its demise. Describing a village in the Crimea (Scuiritacci —I have not been able to identify it) inhabited by the descendants of Genoese mer-chants, Giovanni Botero writes: “Egl’è vero, che havendo perduta la lingua Franca, hanno degenerato nella lingua, e ne’ costumi Tartareschi” (“It is true that, having lost the lingua franca, they degenerated into Tartar language and customs:” Botero, 1596: 94). Unfortunately, this reference to the language—like a significant portion of the early witnesses—was written by a man who did not himself travel to the region he describes, and thus has little merit as historical evidence. Rather, it should be taken as indicative of perceptions of the lingua franca in early modern Italy as a degenerate spin-off of true Italian: the lingua franca suffered from lack of stand-ardization and distance from the metropolitan centers where the regulated form of

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the language might be learned. Lingua franca, in this sense, seems close to what Americans would call “kitchen Italian”—the non-standard language spoken by the descendants of immigrants.

The textual record

Most of those who recorded the corpus of surviving lingua franca “texts” themselves were speakers of a Romance language. Given the plasticity of the language—in par-ticular, the distinct lexicon used in different parts of the Mediterranean—and the fact that it had no written archive that might serve as the model for a standardized version of the language, it seems inevitable that those who transcribed comments they over-heard would bring their transcriptions closer to normative versions of the language that they themselves spoke. Thus, a speaker of Spanish would be more likely to remember and to record “hablar” than “parlar”—both are attested, as the verb meaning “to speak” or “to say”—out of sensitivity both to his own linguistic habits and to the expectations of his audience.

The extant lingua franca “corpus” consists of two distinct kinds of texts: literary works in which a character speaks in lingua franca, and documentary historical works—typically descriptions of voyages of one kind or another—which include records of lingua franca conversations. The literary works provide the earliest witness to the language, yet they are regarded as equivocal sources, because they make no effort to represent themselves as accurate. They give us information about perceptions of the language from the perspective of the emerging European national languages (almost all of them were written in a Romance vernacular), and in some cases they corroborate the evidence presented in the documentary sources. However, neither linguists nor historians typically consider them to be reliable sources of information about linguistic practice.

One of the earliest of these lingua franca texts appears in Fazio degli Uberti’s mid-fourteenth century epic poem, the Dittamondo; and it is an unusual document, violat-ing some of the “rules” that govern the use of lingua franca in both literary and historical works. In this case, the language is identified as franchicá—an Italianization of the Byzantine Greek frangkiká. The protagonist asks (in Greek words transliterated into the Italian alphabet and adjusted to the demands of poetic meter), “do you speak franchicá?” The Greek with whom he is speaking replies in the affirmative; and the conversation switches to Italian.5 In this case, atypically, the speaker of “lingua franca” is the protagonist himself: this is the only instance I know of in which an author rep-resents himself speaking lingua franca. The name which the poet gives it suggests that he knows of the existence of a language, referred to as the language of the Franks, which western Christians use to communicate with locals in the eastern Mediterranean. However, the Italian conversation that follows must be understood in one of two ways: either the (imagined) lingua franca conversation has been translated into Italian to suit the author’s literary purpose; or franchicá should be understood, in this case, to mean Italian.

Although this “document” is equivocal on so many levels, it serves as a useful contrast to other early works that use lingua franca as literary voice. A love poem typically referred to in modern scholarship as the “Contrasto della Zerbitana,” addressed to and partly in the voice of a maiden from Djerba and dating to the early

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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

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they gain entrance to the Christian quarters, they kill a wounded general lying in a makeshift sickroom—confirms the impression that they are not speaking clear or sin-cere Italian, but on the contrary are weaponizing language. As this episode illustrates, from the perspective of speakers of Italian, the lingua franca is “our language, when they—extra-communitarians: natives of the southern or eastern Mediterranean; renegades—speak it to us.”

The seventeenth century sees much more abundant citation of the language, most notably in Sosa’s account of his captivity in Algiers.7 I emphasize the early record—sparse as it is—in part to emphasize this puzzling scarcity, and in part because schol-arly discussions of the language regularly (and for very good reasons) focus on the later period. Between 1484 and 1650 the corpus consists of 20 documented com-ments in the lingua franca known to philologists, 12 of them from Sosa’s description of Algiers. Seventeen of the early lingua franca texts are spoken by men described as Arabs or Turks; two speakers are described as renegades; and one is a dragoman, or translator. Of these, the shortest is Ruffino’s—a single word—though three others are only three words long. The longest is 58 words long:

Veccio, veccio, niçarane Christiano ven aca, porque tener aqui tortuga? qui portata de campaña? gran vellaco estar, qui ha portato. Anda presto piglia, porta fora, guarda diablo, portar a la campaña, questo si tener en casa, estar grande pecato. Mira no trovar mi altra volta, sino a fee de Dio, mi parlar patron donar bona bastonada, mucho mucho. (Cifoletti, 1989: 161; Cifoletti, 2004: 201)

(Old man, old man, Christian (nasrani), Christian (Christiano), come here, why are you holding that turtle? Who brought it from the field? He’s a big scoundrel, the one who brought it. Go, quickly, pick it up, take it outside, for goodness’ sake, take it to the field, if you keep it in the house it’s a great sin. See that I don’t find it another time, if so—by God—I’ll speak to the boss, who will give you a good thrashing, an awful lot.)

Strung together, the corpus consists of a total of 305 words representing 115 different lexemes. The word that appears most frequently in the texts—after prepositions; personal pronouns; “estar,” the verb “to be”; and “grande,” big—is “cane,” which is found seven times in the corpus. “Perro” appears three times. The two words both mean “dog” in Italian and Spanish respectively, and are addressed by slave masters or corsairs to Christian captives. The word “dios” or “dio,” “God,” also appears seven times.

A paltry trail of evidence indeed: too few bones remain to allow us to reconstruct the skeleton of the language. To muddy the waters even further, we possess curious and fragmentary references which suggest that the language at one point might have been on the verge of becoming something more. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in a letter written in 1780, refers to the use of lingua franca as a written vehicular language, used in the process of translating a German work into English, although it is impossible to know what precisely he means by “lingua franca” (and indeed difficult to tell whether the comment is facetious; Bentham, 1968: 2:405). Again, an English translation of a French book published in 1753 refers to a biogra-phy of Tamerlane written in Arabic and translated “by an Arabian” into lingua franca, although I have found no other reference to this ghost-translation; it must have van-ished without trace, if indeed it ever existed (Du Bec, 1750: v–vi). Under the auspices

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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

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nineteenth century, when the evidentiary trail peters out. The evidence is vexingly contradictory, referring to an unfixed Romance-based language which may go by a variety of names. We have enough historical evidence to be confident that the lan-guage existed and that early modern travelers relied upon it as a necessary linguistic strategy. However, we know little—beyond the details I have summarized here—about the nature and structure of the language.10

Negative evidence

Indeed, the category of what we do not know and cannot know about the lingua franca is in some ways more compelling and provocative than the evidence I have amassed here. It seems evident that the language must have emerged from the circu-lation of Italian ships during the Middle Ages. Yet, with the exception of the two equivocal literary texts discussed above (Fazio degli Uberti and the “Contrasto della Zerbitana”), we have no medieval documentation of the language whatsoever. No Arabic-language sources discuss the language in any detail. They occasionally men-tion a “Frankish” language, but because they make no effort to describe the lan-guage, we cannot know whether they refer to the lingua franca or in an entirely imprecise way to “whatever language it is that those Franks speak.” Furthermore, I can point to an extensive body of negative evidence: travelers in territory where the lingua franca is attested by others who say nothing about the language themselves. An anonymous English-language guide for pilgrims published in 1500 includes glos-saries of useful words in Greek and Arabic and makes no mention of the lingua franca (Informacon for pylgrymes, 27–28). During the 1580s, Giovanni Francesco Alcarotti traveled overland from Constantinople to the Holy Land. He compiled a highly-detailed, bracingly pragmatic guide for the pilgrim, including a list of words that one would need on the road—most of them Turkish—and he advised the traveler going by land from Tripoli to Jerusalem to learn a bit of Greek.11 He said nothing about the lingua franca. A 1583 report written for the Venetian Republic laments the loss of souls on ships at sea: extra-communitarians who do not know the lingua franca must die without confession or absolution.12 Lanfreducci and Bosio, Knights of Malta, wrote a detailed work of reconnaissance about the coast of the Maghreb in 1587. They ought to have noted the presence of the language; as we have seen, Bartolomeo Ruffino reported hearing it in Tunis just 10 years earlier. Rather, they tell us that Christian sailors off the Tunisian coast use what Turkish they know to communicate with the local population (Lanfreducci and Bosio, 1925: 440). In 1612, four years before Pietro della Valle’s lingua franca conversation in Damascus, Giovanni Paolo Pesenti passed through nearby Aleppo with a company of Italian merchants on his way to the Holy Land, and left a lively description of Ramadan nights spent drinking coffee and smoking tobacco in the cafes of Aleppo (before either coffee or tobacco were familiar to western Europeans). He says nothing about the lingua franca; he tells us that the traveler must rely upon dragomans in order to communicate with the locals. Santo Brasca in the Holy Land in 1481; Henry de Beauvau in the Holy Land in 1619; Domenico Magri in Mount Lebanon in 1664: this is but a partial list of the mountain of negative evidence, travelers who wrote books about their journeys through the Mediterranean which tell us nothing about the lingua franca.

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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 franca

The 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

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far beyond the Mediterranean environment that generated it. It is not unique to the Mediterranean—other vehicular languages have emerged in other times and places to support human mobility—and yet the Mediterranean left an unmistakable trace of itself in the name we use for it (and for any language of convenience) and in the substance of the language itself (a pidginized Romance, with the occasional word lifted from Arabic, Turkish or Greek). Indeed, it is impossible to conceive two notions crucial to the Mediterraneanist’s conceptual tool-kit—Horden and Purcell’s connectivity over the Braudelian longue durée—without the lingua franca (or some linguistic instrument like it). Without linguistic support—the language itself, as well as the bureaucratic technologies included in the more capacious lingua franca con-ceived by Wansbrough—Mediterranean trade could not be established or sustained over the long term. Too often, it seems, historians disregard or oversimplify this aspect of Mediterranean circulation. Words move like currency between nations (to return to Castiglione’s formulation); and the currency, it seems, must follow in the footsteps of the words—without which neither coins nor merchandise nor people can travel.

Endnotes

1 For “franco piccolo,” see Della Valle (1843: 1:320); for “italien corroumpu,” see Savary de Brèves (1628: 39); for “italien baragouïné,” see Savary de Brèves (1628: 325); for “italiano corrotto,” see Scudéry (1668: 237–238) (an Italian translation of a book originally written in French).

2 “A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche,/But algates therby was she understonde” (Chaucer, “Man of Law’s Tale:”: 519–520; The Riverside Chaucer (94)).

3 The French iargon (jargon in modern French) might mean “corrupt language”; anti-language or argot (“Un langage concerté, que l’on fait pour n’estre entendu que de ceux avec qui on a intelligence”); or might be used contemptuously to refer to languages which one does not understand (“Il se dit aussi abusivement, & par une espece de mespris des Langues estrangeres qu’on n’entend pas”; Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 1st edn (1694), s.v. jargon).

4 Spanish text reprinted in Cifoletti (1989: 157); Cifoletti (2004: 197); see also Sosa (2011: 185). The author of this passage, long thought to be Diego Haedo, has now been identified as Antonio de Sosa.

5 Uberti (1952: 1:249) (Dittamondo III:23: vv 35–39); and see the commentary on these verses, 2:298–301.

6 In illustration of the difficulty in distinguishing between lingua franca and Italian, consider a Greek–Italian dictionary published in 1709, which defines He frangika glo ta as “lingua franca o italiana,” apparently recognizing no substantive difference between the two (Somavera and Parigi, 1709: 84).

7 Sosa’s citations appear in the later volumes of his multi-volume work on Algiers, the Dialogues (De la captividad, De los mártires de Argel, and De los morabutos). These works have not been translated into English; the fragments of lingua franca that appear in the Dialogues, however, have been reprinted and discussed in Cifoletti (1989: 157–164) and Cifoletti (2004: 197–202).

8 As Cifoletti points out, it is linguistically inaccurate to imagine that one could compile a unified lingua franca glossary; by nature, the language differs from place to place and from time to time (Cifoletti, 1989: 31).

9 Gerard de Nerval to Monsieur Labrunie (his father), Cairo, May 2, 1842: Nerval (1911: 132).

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10 For a more detailed discussion, see Jocelyne Dakhlia’s (2008) study: a brilliant and astute historical analysis based on a dazzling assemblage of lingua franca sightings from the most disparate sources.

11 Alcarotti (1596: introduction, p. P). Yet later, in Damascus, Alcarotti is introduced to a guide who “learned a little Italian from some Spaniards, during the time when he was in the Indies” (1596: 59): what language could this possibly be, other than lingua franca?

12 Lamanskı ı (1968: 2:573). Pietro della Valle, in Damascus, describes the last moments of a dying companion who has to confess himself as best he can in “franco piccolo,” because he does not know the local languages (1:322).

13 For a fascinating document in the history of Polari—more precisely, a witness to the presence of lingua franca etyma in British cant—see Hotten, The Slang Dictionary. In the introduction to the second (1864) edition, the author reports:

“There is one source … of secret street terms, which in the first edition of this work was entirely overlooked,—indeed it was unknown to the editor until pointed out by a friendly cor-respondent—the Lingua Franca, or bastard Italian, spoken at Genoa, Trieste, Malta, Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria, and all Mediterranean seaport towns. The ingredients of this imported Cant are many. Its foundation is Italian, with a mixture of modern Greek, German, (from the Austrian ports,) Spanish, Turkish, and French. It has been introduced to the notice of the London wandering tribes by the sailors, foreign and English, who trade to and from the Mediterranean seaports, by the swarms of organ-players from all parts of Italy, and by the makers of images from Rome and Florence,—all of whom, in dense thoroughfares, mingle with our lower orders.” (1864: 22–23).

14 Testimony of Sir C.E. Trevelyan, April, 17, 1855; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, p. 16, para. 13 441.

15 See, for example, Lo squadrone bianco (director: Augusto Genina, 1936). This typical line of dialogue captures both the sentiment and linguistic spirit of the pseudo-lingua franca of Italian empire cinema: “Tutto bene. Nostra vita stare nel deserto. Nel deserto uomo dimenticare tutto” (“Everything good. Our life is in the desert. In the desert a man forgets everything”).

16 Ann Barnard, “Resurgent Beirut Offers Haven Amid Turmoil of Arab Spring,” New York Times, April 13, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/world/middleeast/ resurgent-beirut-offers-a-haven-in-the-arab-spring.html?_r=0 (accessed July 17, 2013).

17 Jon Caramanica, “Myth: Biggie and Pac are Hip-Hop’s Pillars,” Spin, December 2009, 55.

References

Alcarotti, G.F. (1596) Del viaggio di terra santa, Novara: Heredi di Fr. Sesalli. [Anon] (1500) Informacon for Pylgrymes unto the Holy Londe, London: Wynkyn de Word.

Bentham, J. (1968) The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham (ed. T.L.S. Sprigge), 8 vols, London: Athlone Press.

Botero, G. (1596) Relationi universali, Venice: Giorgio Angelieri.Brasca, S. (1481) Relazione del suo viaggio a Gierusalemme, Milan: Leonard Pachel and Ulrich

Scinzenzeler.Carey, M. (1794) A Short Account of Algiers, and of its Several Wars against Spain, France,

England, Holland, Venice, and Other Powers of Europe, 2nd edn, Philadelphia: Mathew Carey.Castiglione, B. (1991) Il cortegiano (ed. C. Cordié), Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori.Chaucer, G. (1987) The Riverside Chaucer (gen. ed. L.D. Benson), 3rd edn, Boston: Houghton

Mifflin.Cifoletti, G. (1989) La lingua franca mediterranea, Padua: Unipress.Cifoletti, G. (2004) La lingua franca barbaresca, Rome: Il Calamo.

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Cortelazzo, Manlio. 1965. “Che cosa s’intendesse per ‘lingua franca.’” Lingua Nostra, 26: 108–110.

Cremona, J. (1997) “Acciocch’ ognuno le possa intendere”: The use of Italian as a lingua franca on the Barbary Coast of the seventeenth century. Evidence from the English. Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies [Malta], 5: 52–69.

Cremona, J. (2002) Italian-based lingua francas around the Mediterranean, in Multilingualism in Italy: Past and Present (eds A.L. Lepschy and A. Tosi), Oxford: Legenda, pp. 24–30.Dakhlia, J. (2008) Lingua franca, Arles: Actes sud.

da Somavera, A. and da Parigi, T. 1709. Tesoro della lingua volgare greca ed italiana. Paris: Guignard.

de Beauvau, H. (1619) Rélation journalière du voyage du Levant, Nancy: Iacob Garnich.degli Uberti, F. (1952) Il Dittamondo e le Rime (ed. G. Corsica). 2 vols, Bari: G.Laterza.Della Valle, P. (1843) Viaggi di Pietro della Valle: Il pellegrino, 3 vols, Brighton: Gancia.de Nerval, G. (1911) Correspondance (1830–1855) (ed. J. Marsan), 2nd edn, Paris: Mercure de

France.de Scudéry, G. (1668) Il perfetto Ibrahim, ovvero l’Illustre Bassa, Venice: Abbondio

Menafogli.de Sosa, A. (2011) An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of

Algiers (1612) (ed. M.A. Garcés) (trans. D. de Armas Wilson), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, (1694),1st edn, Paris.Dryden, J. (1735) Limberham; or, The Kind Keeper, London: J.Tonson.Du Bec, J. (1750) The history of the life of Tamerlane the Great, London: Strahan.Galt, J. (1813) Letters from the Levant, London: Cadell and Davies.Grandchamp, P. (1920–33) La France en Tunisie, 10 vols, Tunis: Imprimerie Rapide.Hotten, J.C. (1864) The Slang Dictionary; or, The Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and

“Fast”Expressions of High and Low Society, London: J.C. Hotten.House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (1854–55) Third report from the Select Committee on

the Army before Sebastopol.Kahane, H.R. (1976) Lingua Franca: The Story of a Term. Romance Philology, 30: 25–41.Lamanskı ĭ, V.I. (1968) Secrets d’État de Venise; documents, extraits, notices, et études servant à

éclaircir les rapports de la seigneurie avec les Grecs, les Slaves, et la Porte ottomane à la fin du XVe et au XVIe, 2 vols, Rpt., New York: B. Franklin.

Lanfreducci, F. and Bosio, G.O. (1925) Costa e Discorsi di Barberia (ed. C. Monchicourt. Revue Africaine, 66: 419–549.

Magri, D. (1664) Breve racconto del viaggio al monte Libano, 2nd edn, Viterbo: Diotalleui.Matthews, P.H. Lingua franca. Oxford Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.

oxfordreference.com/ (accessed October 15, 2012).OED Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press. www.oed.com/ (accessed October 15, 2012).Pesenti, G.P. (1628) Peregrinaggio di Giervsalemme, Brescia: Bartolomeo Fontana.Savary de Brèves, F. (1628) Relation des voyages de monsieur de Brèves, tant en Grèce, Terre

Saincte et Aegypte, qu’aux Royaumes de Tunis et Arger, Paris: Nicolas Gasse.Sebag, P. (1971) Une relation inédite sur la prise de Tunis par les Turcs en 1574. Sopra la

desolatione della Goletta e forte di Tunisi de Bartholomeo Ruffino, Tunis: L’Université de Tunis.

Thompson, J. (2010) Edward William Lane, 1801–1876: The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.

Tyler, R. (1797) The Algerine captive, 2 vols, Walpole, NH: Carlisle.Wansbrough, J. (1996) Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean, Surrey: Curzon.Wilson, J. (1691) Belphegor, or, The marriage of the Devil, London: Luke Meredith.

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Further Reading

Cremona, J. (1997) “Acciocch’ ognuno le possa intendere”: The use of Italian as a lingua franca on the Barbary Coast of the seventeenth century. Evidence from the English. Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies [Malta], 5: 52–69. On the use of Italian as bureaucratic language at the French consulate at Tunis, by the

scholar who first studied the Italian-language documents in this important archive.Cremona, J. (2002) Italian-based lingua francas around the Mediterranean, in Multilingualism

in Italy: Past and Present (eds A.L. Lepschy and A. Tosi), Oxford: Legenda, pp. 24–30.A broad look at the life of Italian throughout the Mediterranean; compares Italian outside

Italy to the lingua franca.de Sosa, A.(2011) An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers

(1612) (ed. M.A. Garcés) (trans. D. de Armas Wilson), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.The most detailed and liveliest account of life as a captive in the bagnio of Algiers.

Kahane, H, and Tietze, R. and A. (1958) The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin, Urbana: University of Illinois. A fascinating study of the trans-lingual life of nautical terminology.

Schuchardt, H. (1980) The lingua franca, in Pidgin and Creole Languages: Selected Essays by Hugo Schuchardt (ed. and trans. G.G. Gilbert), London and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–88. A seminal essay: The first modern linguistic study of lingua franca (originally published in

German in 1906). Though outdated, it has historical interest, and raises important (and still unanswered) questions about the language.

Selbach, R. (2008) The superstrate is not always the lexifier: Lingua franca in the Barbary Coast, 1530–1830, in Roots of Creole Structures: Weighing the contribution of substrates and superstrates (ed. S. Michaelis), Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 29–58. Takes up one of the most puzzling questions posed by the lingua franca: why would Arab

slave-masters, corsairs and customs officials learn the language of a subject population—slaves, captives, pilgrims and tourists—in order to do business with them?

Thomason, S.G. and Elgibali, A. (1986) Before the lingua franca: Pidginized Arabic in the eleventh century A.D. Lingua, 68: 317–49.Linguistic study of an Arabic-based pidgin; an intriguing point of comparison for the lingua

franca.

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