The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce. However, the term "Franks" was actually applied to all Western Europeans during the late Byzantine Period. Later, the meaning of lingua franca expanded to mean any bridge language. Its other name in the Mediterranean area was Sabir, a term cognate of ("to know") in most Iberian languages and of Italian and Latin and French .
Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Tamazight, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.
The grammar of the language used aspects from many of its lexifiers. The infinitive was used for all verb forms and the lexicon was primarily Italo-Romance, with a Spanish interface. As in Arabic, vowel space was reduced. Further, Venetian influences can be seen in the dropping of certain vowels and intervocalic stops.
This mixed language was used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio, Barbary pirates and European renegades in precolonial Algiers. Historically, the first to use it were the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean after the year 1000.
The similarities contribute to discussions of the classification of Lingua Franca as a language. Although its official classification is that of a pidgin, some scholars adamantly oppose that classification and believe it would be better viewed as an interlanguage of Italian.
Hugo Schuchardt (1842âÂÂ1927) was the first scholar to investigate the Lingua Franca systematically. According to the monogenetic theory of the origin of pidgins that he developed, Lingua Franca was known by Mediterranean sailors including the Portuguese. When the Portuguese started exploring the seas of Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, they tried to communicate with the natives by mixing a Portuguese-influenced version of Lingua Franca with the local languages. When English or French ships came to compete with the Portuguese, the crews tried to learn the "broken Portuguese". A process of relexification caused the Lingua Franca and Portuguese lexicon to be substituted by the languages of the peoples in contact.
The theory is one way of explaining the similarities between most of the European-based pidgins and creole languages, such as Tok Pisin, Papiamento, Sranan Tongo, Krio and Chinese Pidgin English. Those languages use forms similar to or derived from sabir for 'to know' and piquenho for "children".
Lingua Franca left traces in present Algerian slang and Polari. There are traces even in geographical names, such as Cape Guardafui, which literally means "Cape Look and Escape" in Lingua Franca and ancient Italian.
Because it was a pidgin, Mediterranean Lingua Franca had a very small vocabulary. This and the fact the language is not well attested means only a few hundred words in the language have been recorded to the present-day.