3 ms·
No, because "lingua franca" derives from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca whi
by tagrun 5y ago
No, because "lingua franca" derives from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca which has nothing to do with French, apart from people who didn't understand it mistook it for "French".
- svieira 5y agoPart of the empire the Franks founded was named "France" and France still traces its origins to Frankish kings. So connecting a trade language spoken by the empire-before-the-empire with the empire of France doesn't seem that far off-base to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks
- tagrun 5y agoFrom the wikipedia article on Mediterranean Lingua Franca > Based mostly on Northern Italian languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese dialects) and secondarily from Occitano-Romance languages... So it's not the "language of Franks". Also, > Lingua franca means literally "language of the Franks" in Late Latin, and originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce. However, the terms "Franks" and "Frankish" were actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period.
- estaseuropano 5y agoFrench was a minority language in modern day France for most of the region's history.
- nescioquid 5y agoGreat comment! I always presumed the term was an 18th-19th century coinage referring to French; had no idea it referred to a pidgin originating in the late middle ages. Thanks for the enlightenment!