lingua franca

[frang-kuh]

noun

plural

lingua francas, linguae francae 

1. any language that is widely used as a means of communication among speakers of other languages.

2. (initial capital letter),  the Italian-Provençal jargon (with elements of Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish) formerly widely used in eastern Mediterranean ports.

lingua franca

¹

/ ˈlɪŋɡwə ˈfræŋkə /

noun

1. a language used for communication among people of different mother tongues

2. a hybrid language containing elements from several different languages used in this way

3. any system of communication providing mutual understanding

Lingua Franca

²

noun

1. a particular lingua franca spoken from the time of the Crusades to the 18th century in the ports of the Mediterranean, based on Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish

Word History and Origins

Origin of lingua franca¹

1670–80; < Italian: literally, Frankish tongue

Word History and Origins

Origin of lingua franca¹

C17: Italian, literally: Frankish tongue

Example Sentences

Sport was the exception to the rule that all things American were the world’s cultural lingua franca.

From Los Angeles Times

The talk was in Spanish, an unremarkable fact given the language has been the lingua franca on most construction sites in Southern California for decades.

From Los Angeles Times

Most are published in languages other than English, the lingua franca of science, and only a small fraction of them are indexed in international citation and index systems.

From Science Magazine

But Hollywood is a place where hope frequently comes to die, and “They Went Another Way” is a comic primer on how good ideas are slowly strangled by an unwieldy and inefficient streamocracy whose lingua franca is the artfully evasive lie.

From Los Angeles Times

To mix languages, English is the lingua franca of F1.

From BBC

Related Words

• accent 
• dialect 
• expression 
• jargon 
• prose 
• sound 
• speech 
• style 
• terminology 
• vocabulary 
• voice 
• word 
• wording