The understanding between different peoples has always been an essential element for the development of societies and cultures. Of course, one of the main obstacles these peoples faced was the language barrier, since there were many communities that communicated in a specific language which was sometimes unrelated to the rest of the languages spoken by other communities with whom they were in contact. What happened when a group of people arrived to foreign lands and wanted to trade? How did two peoples communicate on issues such as the relations between their states? And, on the crueler side of history, how did troops that arrived to foreign territories with aims of conquest communicate with the locals? Without a doubt, this is an ideal occasion to once again highlight the work of translators, even if in specific moments of history they were not known as such, who worked to decipher the linguistic codes of other communities speaking different languages to establish channels of communication which, from the most rudimentary stages, evolved into authentic and effective communication systems, which are nowadays known as lingua francas.
The expression “lingua franca”, as the term itself reveals, comes from a specific region of the world. Nowadays, however, more neutral expressions are used, such as “vehicular language”. This expression originally refers to the Frankish or Teutonic language, a West Germanic language spoken by the Franks in the area that corresponds to the current countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany and which allowed communication to take place between all of these groups of people, making their political and trade relations possible. Other lingua francas would begin to appear in different historical periods. One of the first worth mentioning is Latin which, over the centuries, was used as a cohesive language by the Roman Empire during their expansion throughout Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor In fact, in spite of the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin continued to be used as a language for scientific publications and politics, given that it had been widely used among intellectuals. However, its use coexisted with the languages spoken by ordinary people who didn’t have access to academic studies, and thus Latin ended up being mixed with other languages and, little by little, assimilating all different types of linguistic phenomena, since people adopted words, gave new meanings to other words, changed the pronunciation or original spelling of a word or created new syntactic uses, etc. Thus, lingua francas are the result of combining a main language, which is used to have a more widespread impact, with one or more different languages spoken by natives who, while continuing to speak their mother tongue, use the main language for other purposes, such as trade, education or, due to enforcement, for survival. In the case of Latin, this shared existence and patchwork was what spawned the Romance languages, which are none other than the result of the mixture of Latin used by people from different regions and their local languages. This is how Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian and many other languages were born.
Of course, throughout history other lingua francas have existed. One that is less well-known was Sabir, which was used in the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages by merchants, sailors and diplomats. This was a mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, Provençal, Arabic, Turkish and some Berber languages and, interestingly enough, mentioned by Cervantes himself in Don Quijote. In turn, Arabic was considered the lingua franca of the Islamic Empire from the 7th to the 15th century, which reached all the way to the borders of China, Northern India, France and Portugal. This language became the main language of communication in this vast territory and, as a result, enriched other languages with which it came into contact. Between the 17th and the 19th century we can highlight the role of French as the lingua franca of diplomacy, mainly due to the rise of the Enlightenment, although it also had a significant presence in the cultural sphere. It became the language of intellectuals, and learning French became a way to distinguish oneself. This language became widely popular, not only in the most western parts of Europe, but also in the Russian aristocracy. In fact, nowadays Russia has many Gallicisms as a result of this period of coexistence. It was much more difficult for French to spread than it was for Latin, but the former started to gain ground on the latter by standardized communication.
Lastly, we must point out that many authors distinguish between lingua francas, in the way we described earlier, and world languages, which are languages that centralize communication on a much larger scale, since the previously mentioned examples refer to territories on a more regional level. World languages allow people from any part of the world to communicate and are the preferred languages for scientific publications and research. Currently, English is indisputably the most dominant world language, but the future is still uncertain when it comes to the vehicular languages we will speak and the impact these languages will have on our culture.
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