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A lingua franca (/ ˌ l ɪ ŋ ɡ w ə ˈ f r æ ŋ k ə /; lit. ' Frankish tongue '; for plurals see § Usage notes), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect ...
German served as a lingua franca in portions of Europe for centuries, mainly the Holy Roman Empire outside of the sphere of influence of the Hanseatic League, which used Low German, and to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe where the Polish Empire and the Russian Empire dominated, and South-Eastern Europe where the Ottoman Empire was the ...
Greek East and Latin West are terms used to distinguish between the two parts of the Greco-Roman world and of medieval Christendom, specifically the eastern regions where Greek was the lingua franca (Greece, Anatolia, the southern Balkans, the Levant, and Egypt) and the western parts where Latin filled this role (Italy, Gaul, Hispania, North Africa, the northern Balkans, territories in Central ...
English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the use of the English language "as a global means of inter-community communication" [1] [2] [full citation needed] and can be understood as "any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice and often the only option".
Latin served as the undisputed European lingua franca until the 19th century, when the cultures of vernacular languages and the "national languages" started to gain ground and claim status. Today, several institutions of the European Union use Latin in their logos and domain names instead of listing their names in all the official languages.
Europe has had a number of languages that were considered linguae francae over some ranges for some periods according to some historians. Typically in the rise of a national language the new language becomes a lingua franca to peoples in the range of the future nation until the consolidation and unification phases.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, [1] or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. [2] April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean ...
Sogdian, an eastern Iranian language, becomes the lingua franca of the Silk Road in Central Asia leading to China, due to the proliferation of Sogdian merchants there. Greek settlements and Byzantine rule make the last Anatolian languages extinct. Turkic languages start replacing Scythian languages. 500–1000: Early Middle Ages.