Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and today we'll figure out what a lingua

Franca is, and then we'll talk about who versus that. This next segment is by Alexandra Eichenwald.

When the Crusaders descended upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean at the end of the 11th century, they had to communicate with each other, with traitors and with locals.

Many of them spoke different romance languages, Italian, especially from the then powerful city-states of Venice and Genoa, Provenvencal, French, or the forerunner, Latin.

Most Westerners in Southern Europe were French, especially from between Marseille and Genoa, from where ships and traders sailed toward the Middle East.

These Westerners, as a whole, came to be called Franci, Franks, or French, by Arabs and Greeks.

Around the time of the Fourth Crusade, 1202 to 1204, and maybe earlier, a mixed language gradually

emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean and later spread to the west. This common language

used by the Franks and those who traded and fought with them was also known as Sabir,

but you might be most familiar with the term lingua franca, literally Franks language.

The Frankish language was a mixture of simplified Italian, French,

and Spanish, with a smattering of Arabic and Turkish, and was in use across the Mediterranean

shores in the Middle East until the late 19th century before it faded away. Written with lowercase,

lingua franca refers to any language used between

people who have no other language in common. Linguifrancas go back to antiquity. Sanskrit was a

lingua franca through Southeast Asia and Central Asia in the first millennium CE via trade and religion.

Around the Mediterranean, Greek was a lingua franca, from about 300 BCE until about 500 CE,

used in trade, literature, and education, and in spreading early Christianity.

Between the second and fourth centuries, standard Latin replaced Greek as the lingua franca

of the expanding Catholic Church.

Latin took over as the pan-European language of religion, culture, and scholarship, and

continued well into the 19th century.

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