Happy Birthday, Lingua Franca!

Slightly more than four years and a thousand posts ago, at the behest of the editor Heidi Landecker at The Chronicle of Higher Education, this Lingua Franca blog came into being. Since that time, day after day, our motley crew has mused, elucidated, queried, uncovered, advertised, challenged, and pontificated about language, more or less as Heidi and Liz McMillen, The Chronicle’s editor,  had envisioned. And you, dear readers, have responded with everything from dissertations of your own to completely irrelevant remarks, adventuring into niches we never had thought of. (Regarding niche, see Anne Curzan’s post of September 26, 2014.)

On this more or less anniversary it seems fitting to salute the erudite and elegant expression lingua franca itself. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that it’s actually an Italian term, not an ancient Latin one, though the two look alike. Lingua  of course means “language,” but franca? A little history is needed.

Franca relates to France, but not in the way you might expect. The Franks were a Germanic nation, and when they conquered the territory of Gaul, some 1,500 years ago, their name became the name of the region, the France we know today.

And in the course of centuries, as ancient Latin developed into the modern vernacular languages Italian, Spanish, French, and the like, a trade language developed incorporating elements intelligible to all. And it was called, appropriately, lingua franca. Technically lingua franca  is a pidgin, “deriving its lexicon mainly from the southern Romance languages, first in the eastern Mediterranean and later throughout much of northern Africa and the Middle East,” according to the OED.

That lingua franca  is now history. But we use the term even today to designate a language or method of communication intelligible to all.

So here we have our own Lingua Franca, bringing together our intelligence, and yours, intelligibly. On to the next thousand!

But first, let me invite you to remind us of any particular post of the thousand gone by that has stuck with you, improved your life, or made the world a better place. Any recollections?