lingua franca, auxiliary or compromise language used between
groups having no other language in common. Examples are English
and French for diplomatic purposes, Swahili in eastern Africa,
Hindi and English in India, Melanesian Pidgin in the South
Pacific, and Bazaar Malay in the East Indian archipelago. The
term lingua franca (“Frankish language”) was perhaps first
applied to a jargon or pidgin based on southern French and
Italian, developed by crusaders and traders for use in the
eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. In the post-
Renaissance period of European exploration, many other such
contact languages developed—e.g., Indo-Portuguese (Ceylon),
Annamite-French (Indochina), Papiamento (based on Spanish,
spoken in Curaçao), and several types of Pidgin English—all of
these based on the languages of the European colonizing nations.
Insofar as a European language was simplified or distorted in
pronunciation or grammar, it became a pidgin. When such a pidgin
or other lingua franca replaced the original l