
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
Mediterranean Lingua Franca | |
---|---|
sabir | |
Region | Mediterranean basin |
Extinct | 19th century |
primarily Romance-based pidgin
| |
Dialects |
|
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | pml |
pml.html | |
Glottolog | ling1242 |
Linguasphere | 51-AAB-c |

Etymology
Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce. However, the term "Franks" was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period. Later, the meaning of lingua franca expanded to mean any bridge language. Its other name in the Mediterranean area was Sabir, a term cognate of saber ("to know") in most Iberian languages and of Italian and Latin sapere and French savoir.[citation needed]
Origins
Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Tamazight, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.[citation needed]
The grammar of the language used aspects from many of its lexifiers. The infinitive was used for all verb forms and the lexicon was primarily Italo-Romance, with a Spanish interface. As in Arabic, vowel space was reduced, and Venetian influences can be seen in the dropping of certain vowels and intervocalic stops.[citation needed]
History
This mixed language was used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio, Barbary pirates and European renegades in precolonial Algiers. Historically, the first to use it were the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean after the year 1000.
As the use of Lingua Franca spread in the Mediterranean, dialectal fragmentation emerged, the main difference being more use of Italian and Provençal vocabulary in the Middle East, while Ibero-Romance lexical material dominated in the Maghreb. After France became the dominant power in the latter area in the 19th century, Algerian Lingua Franca was heavily gallicised (to the extent that locals are reported having believed that they spoke French when conversing in Lingua Franca with the Frenchmen, who in turn thought they were speaking Arabic), and this version of the language was spoken into the nineteen hundreds.... Algerian French was indeed a dialect of French, although Lingua Franca certainly had had an influence on it.... Lingua Franca also seems to have affected other languages. Eritrean Pidgin Italian, for instance, displayed some remarkable similarities with it, in particular the use of Italian participles as past or perfective markers. It seems reasonable to assume that these similarities have been transmitted through Italian foreigner talk stereotypes.
The similarities contribute to discussions of the classification of Lingua Franca as a language. Although its official classification is that of a pidgin, some scholars adamantly oppose that classification and believe it would be better viewed as an interlanguage of Italian.
Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) was the first scholar to investigate the Lingua Franca systematically. According to the monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins that he developed, Lingua Franca was known by Mediterranean sailors including the Portuguese. 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 crews tried to learn the "broken Portuguese". A process of relexification caused the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon to be substituted by the languages of the peoples in contact.
The theory is one way of explaining the similarities between most of the European-based pidgins and creole languages, such as Tok Pisin, Papiamento, Sranan Tongo, Krio and Chinese Pidgin English. Those languages use forms similar to or derived from sabir for 'to know' and piquenho for "children".[citation needed]
Lingua Franca left traces in present Algerian slang and Polari. There are traces even in geographical names, such as Cape Guardafui, which literally means "Cape Look and Escape" in Lingua Franca and ancient Italian.
Phonology
Bilabial | Labio-Dental | Labio-Velar | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | voiced | m | n | ɲ | ||||
Plosive | voiceless | p | t | k | ||||
voiced | b | d | tʃ | g | ||||
Affricate | sibilant | ts | ʤ | |||||
Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʃ | ||||
voiced | v | z | ||||||
Approximant | w | j | ||||||
Trill | r | |||||||
Lateral approximant | l | ʎ |
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
Close | i | u | |
Mid | e | o | |
Open | a |
Syntax
Singular | Plural | |
---|---|---|
1st person | mi | noi |
2nd person | ti | voi |
3rd person | ellou (m) ella (f) | elli |
Vocabulary
Because it is a pidgin, Mediterranean Lingua Franca had a very small vocabulary. This and the fact the language is not well attested means only a few hundred words in the language have been recorded to the present-day.
Sample text
Sabir | English |
---|---|
Benda ti istran plegrin benda marqueta maidin. Benda benda stringa da da agugeta colorada dali moro namorada y ala ti da bon matin. Por ala te rrecomenda dar maidin marqueta benda con bestio tuto lespenda xomaro estar bon rroçin. Peregrin taybo cristian si querer andar Jordan pilla per tis jornis pan que no trobar pan ne vin | Benda, [oh] you foreign pilgrim – benda, marqueta, maidin [names of coins] One benda, one benda, I give a lace, a colored lace. Give it to your Arab girlfriend and Allah give you a good morning. By Allah I recommend you to spend a maidin, a marqueta, a benda [to hire] a beast complete with provisions: a donkey is an excellent steed. Good Christian pilgrim, if you wish to go to the Jordan, take bread for your journey for you will find neither bread nor wine |
See also
- African Romance
- Mozarabic language
- Lingua Franca Nova
Notes
- Operstein, Natalie. "The syntactic structures of Lingua Franca in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque" (PDF). Retrieved 29 May 2023.
Although written representations of, and/or extra-linguistic comments on, LF come from more than one period and more than one area of the Mediterranean, the principal documentation of this contact language is circumscribed by the area of the Maghreb in the period between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century (Cifoletti 1989, 2004; Camus Bergareche 1993; Arends 1998; Couto 2002)
- Bruni, Francesco. "Storia della Lingua Italiana: Gli scambi linguistici nel Mediterraneo e la lingua franca" [History of the Italian Language: Linguistic exchanges in the Mediterranean and the lingua franca] (in Italian). Archived from the original on 28 March 2009. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
- McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change (in German). Cambridge University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-521-44665-5. Retrieved 29 May 2023.
- "lingua franca". Oxford English Dictionary. Retrieved 13 December 2011.
- Lexico Triantaphyllide online dictionary, Greek Language Center (Kentro Hellenikes Glossas), lemma Franc (Φράγκος Phrankos), Lexico tes Neas Hellseenikes Glossas, G.Babiniotes, Kentro Lexikologias(Legicology Center) LTD Publications. Komvos.edu.gr. 2002. ISBN 960-86190-1-7. Archived from the original on 24 March 2012. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
Franc and (prefix) franco- (Φράγκος Phrankos and φράγκο- phranko-
- Weekley, Ernest (1921). "frank". An etymological dictionary of modern English. London. p. 595. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
{{cite encyclopedia}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - (2005). (ed.). "Foreword to A Glossary of Lingua Franca" (5th ed.). Milwaukee, WI, United States. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 4 December 2015.
- Operstein, Natalie (2 December 2021). The Lingua Franca: Contact-Induced Language Change in the Mediterranean (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact) (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 107–116, 315. ISBN 978-1316518311.
- Mallette, Karla. "Mediterranean lingua franca, ca. 1450-1650: Threshold or holdover?" (PDF). pp. 30, 32, 46.
- Mallette, Karla. "Mediterranean lingua franca, ca. 1450-1650: Threshold or holdover?" (PDF). pp. 30, 32, 46.
Bibliography
- Brown, Joshua. 2022. "On the Existence of a Mediterranean Lingua Franca and the Persistence of Language Myths". Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period (edited by Karen Bennett and Angelo Cattaneo). London: Routledge, pp. 169–189. ISBN 9780367552145.
- Brown, Joshua. 2024. "Digital approaches to multilingual text analysis: the Dictionnaire de la langue franque and its morphology as hybrid data in the past". Multilingual Digital Humanities (edited by Lorella Viola and Paul Spence). Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. London: Routledge, pp.213-229.
- Dakhlia, Jocelyne, Lingua Franca – Histoire d'une langue métisse en Méditerranée, Actes Sud, 2008, ISBN 2-7427-8077-7.
- John A. Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-35940-6, p. 607.
- Henry Romanos Kahane, The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin, University of Illinois, 1958.
- Hugo Schuchardt, "The Lingua Franca". Pidgin and Creole languages: selected essays by Hugo Schuchardt (edited and translated by Glenn G. Gilbert), Cambridge University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-521-22789-5.
- Nolan, Joanna. 2020. The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Drusteler, Eric R. 2012. "Speaking in Tongues: Language and communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean." Past and Present 217: 4-77. doi:10.1093/pastj/gts023.
- Hitchcock, Louise A., and Aren M. Maeir. 2016. "A Pirate's Life for me: The Maritime culture of the Sea Peoples." Palestine Exploration Quarterly 148(4):245-264.
- Lang, George. 1992. "The Literary Settings of Lingua Franca (1300-1830)." Neophilologus 76(1): 64-76. doi:10.1007/BF00316757.
- Operstein, Natalie. 2018. "Inflection in Lingua Franca: from Haedo's Topographia to the Dictionnaire de la langue franque." Morphology 28: 145-185. doi:10.1007/s11525-018-9320-8.
External links
- Dictionnaire de la Langue Franque ou Petit Mauresque, 1830. (In French)
- A Glossary of Lingua Franca, fifth edition, 2005, . It includes articles about the language from various authors and sample texts.
- Tales in Sabir from Algeria
- Lingua franca in the Mediterranean (Google book)
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca or Sabir was a contact language or languages that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries April McMahon describes Sabir as a fifteenth century proto pidgin and a relic of the original Lingua Franca a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and Lingua Franca as separate but related languages Mediterranean Lingua FrancasabirRegionMediterranean basinExtinct19th centuryLanguage familyprimarily Romance based pidgin Mediterranean Lingua FrancaDialectsSabir Lingua FrancaLanguage codesISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code pml class extiw title iso639 3 pml pml a Linguist Listpml htmlGlottologling1242Linguasphere51 AAB cThe Mediterranean depicted in the Catalan Atlas 1375 EtymologyLingua franca meant literally Frankish language in Late Latin and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce However the term Franks was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period Later the meaning of lingua franca expanded to mean any bridge language Its other name in the Mediterranean area was Sabir a term cognate of saber to know in most Iberian languages and of Italian and Latin sapere and French savoir citation needed OriginsBased mostly on Northern Italy s languages mainly Venetian and Genoese and secondarily on Occitano Romance languages Catalan and Occitan in the western Mediterranean area at first Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements especially on the Barbary Coast now referred to as the Maghreb Lingua Franca also borrowed from Tamazight Turkish French Greek and Arabic citation needed The grammar of the language used aspects from many of its lexifiers The infinitive was used for all verb forms and the lexicon was primarily Italo Romance with a Spanish interface As in Arabic vowel space was reduced and Venetian influences can be seen in the dropping of certain vowels and intervocalic stops citation needed HistoryThis mixed language was used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio Barbary pirates and European renegades in precolonial Algiers Historically the first to use it were the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean after the year 1000 As the use of Lingua Franca spread in the Mediterranean dialectal fragmentation emerged the main difference being more use of Italian and Provencal vocabulary in the Middle East while Ibero Romance lexical material dominated in the Maghreb After France became the dominant power in the latter area in the 19th century Algerian Lingua Franca was heavily gallicised to the extent that locals are reported having believed that they spoke French when conversing in Lingua Franca with the Frenchmen who in turn thought they were speaking Arabic and this version of the language was spoken into the nineteen hundreds Algerian French was indeed a dialect of French although Lingua Franca certainly had had an influence on it Lingua Franca also seems to have affected other languages Eritrean Pidgin Italian for instance displayed some remarkable similarities with it in particular the use of Italian participles as past or perfective markers It seems reasonable to assume that these similarities have been transmitted through Italian foreigner talk stereotypes The similarities contribute to discussions of the classification of Lingua Franca as a language Although its official classification is that of a pidgin some scholars adamantly oppose that classification and believe it would be better viewed as an interlanguage of Italian Hugo Schuchardt 1842 1927 was the first scholar to investigate the Lingua Franca systematically According to the monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins that he developed Lingua Franca was known by Mediterranean sailors including the Portuguese 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 crews tried to learn the broken Portuguese A process of relexification caused the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon to be substituted by the languages of the peoples in contact The theory is one way of explaining the similarities between most of the European based pidgins and creole languages such as Tok Pisin Papiamento Sranan Tongo Krio and Chinese Pidgin English Those languages use forms similar to or derived from sabir for to know and piquenho for children citation needed Lingua Franca left traces in present Algerian slang and Polari There are traces even in geographical names such as Cape Guardafui which literally means Cape Look and Escape in Lingua Franca and ancient Italian PhonologyConsonants Bilabial Labio Dental Labio Velar Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal VelarNasal voiced m n ɲPlosive voiceless p t kvoiced b d tʃ gAffricate sibilant ts ʤFricative voiceless f s ʃvoiced v zApproximant w jTrill rLateral approximant l ʎVowels Front Central BackClose i uMid e oOpen aSyntaxPronouns Singular Plural1st person mi noi2nd person ti voi3rd person ellou m ella f elliVocabularyBecause it is a pidgin Mediterranean Lingua Franca had a very small vocabulary This and the fact the language is not well attested means only a few hundred words in the language have been recorded to the present day Sample textSabir EnglishBenda ti istran plegrin benda marqueta maidin Benda benda stringa da da agugeta colorada dali moro namorada y ala ti da bon matin Por ala te rrecomenda dar maidin marqueta benda con bestio tuto lespenda xomaro estar bon rrocin Peregrin taybo cristian si querer andar Jordan pilla per tis jornis pan que no trobar pan ne vin Benda oh you foreign pilgrim benda marqueta maidin names of coins One benda one benda I give a lace a colored lace Give it to your Arab girlfriend and Allah give you a good morning By Allah I recommend you to spend a maidin a marqueta a benda to hire a beast complete with provisions a donkey is an excellent steed Good Christian pilgrim if you wish to go to the Jordan take bread for your journey for you will find neither bread nor wineSee alsoAfrican Romance Mozarabic language Lingua Franca NovaNotesOperstein Natalie The syntactic structures of Lingua Franca in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque PDF Retrieved 29 May 2023 Although written representations of and or extra linguistic comments on LF come from more than one period and more than one area of the Mediterranean the principal documentation of this contact language is circumscribed by the area of the Maghreb in the period between the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century Cifoletti 1989 2004 Camus Bergareche 1993 Arends 1998 Couto 2002 Bruni Francesco Storia della Lingua Italiana Gli scambi linguistici nel Mediterraneo e la lingua franca History of the Italian Language Linguistic exchanges in the Mediterranean and the lingua franca in Italian Archived from the original on 28 March 2009 Retrieved 28 March 2009 McMahon A M S 1994 Understanding Language Change in German Cambridge University Press p 256 ISBN 978 0 521 44665 5 Retrieved 29 May 2023 lingua franca Oxford English Dictionary Retrieved 13 December 2011 Lexico Triantaphyllideonline dictionary Greek Language Center Kentro Hellenikes Glossas lemma Franc FragkosPhrankos Lexico tes Neas Hellseenikes Glossas G Babiniotes Kentro Lexikologias Legicology Center LTD Publications Komvos edu gr 2002 ISBN 960 86190 1 7 Archived from the original on 24 March 2012 Retrieved 18 June 2015 Franc and prefix franco Fragkos Phrankos and fragko phranko Weekley Ernest 1921 frank An etymological dictionary of modern English London p 595 Retrieved 18 June 2015 a href wiki Template Cite encyclopedia title Template Cite encyclopedia cite encyclopedia a CS1 maint location missing publisher link 2005 ed Foreword to A Glossary of Lingua Franca 5th ed Milwaukee WI United States Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 Retrieved 4 December 2015 Operstein Natalie 2 December 2021 The Lingua Franca Contact Induced Language Change in the Mediterranean Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact 1st ed Cambridge University Press pp 107 116 315 ISBN 978 1316518311 Mallette Karla Mediterranean lingua franca ca 1450 1650 Threshold or holdover PDF pp 30 32 46 Mallette Karla Mediterranean lingua franca ca 1450 1650 Threshold or holdover PDF pp 30 32 46 BibliographyBrown Joshua 2022 On the Existence of a Mediterranean Lingua Franca and the Persistence of Language Myths Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period edited by Karen Bennett and Angelo Cattaneo London Routledge pp 169 189 ISBN 9780367552145 Brown Joshua 2024 Digital approaches to multilingual text analysis the Dictionnaire de la langue franque and its morphology as hybrid data in the past Multilingual Digital Humanities edited by Lorella Viola and Paul Spence Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities London Routledge pp 213 229 Dakhlia Jocelyne Lingua Franca Histoire d une langue metisse en Mediterranee Actes Sud 2008 ISBN 2 7427 8077 7 John A Holm Pidgins and Creoles Cambridge University Press 1989 ISBN 0 521 35940 6 p 607 Henry Romanos Kahane The Lingua Franca in the Levant Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin University of Illinois 1958 Hugo Schuchardt The Lingua Franca Pidgin and Creole languages selected essays by Hugo Schuchardt edited and translated by Glenn G Gilbert Cambridge University Press 1980 ISBN 0 521 22789 5 Nolan Joanna 2020 The Elusive Case of Lingua Franca Switzerland Palgrave Macmillan Drusteler Eric R 2012 Speaking in Tongues Language and communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean Past and Present 217 4 77 doi 10 1093 pastj gts023 Hitchcock Louise A and Aren M Maeir 2016 A Pirate s Life for me The Maritime culture of the Sea Peoples Palestine Exploration Quarterly 148 4 245 264 Lang George 1992 The Literary Settings of Lingua Franca 1300 1830 Neophilologus 76 1 64 76 doi 10 1007 BF00316757 Operstein Natalie 2018 Inflection in Lingua Franca from Haedo s Topographia to the Dictionnaire de la langue franque Morphology 28 145 185 doi 10 1007 s11525 018 9320 8 External linksDictionnaire de la Langue Franque ou Petit Mauresque 1830 In French A Glossary of Lingua Franca fifth edition 2005 It includes articles about the language from various authors and sample texts Tales in Sabir from Algeria Lingua franca in the Mediterranean Google book